Voting Power Should Decay: A Delegate Activity and Competence License for ENS

ENS governance depends on delegates who were elected once and then, in practice, hold voting power forever unless tokenholders manually notice and redelegate. Most delegate programs assume ongoing attention from tokenholders that rarely actually happens. People delegate once, get busy, and stop checking. The result is a quiet drift. Voting power can sit with delegates who stopped voting, stopped explaining their reasoning, or stopped engaging months ago, simply because nobody went through the effort of moving it. This is not a scandal. It is what happens by default when power has no expiration and attention has a cost. The fix is not removing delegates or adding more social pressure. It is making voting power behave like a renewable license instead of a permanent grant. Mechanism: Delegate License + Voting Power Decay 1. Public delegate activity baseline Who decides: the DAO ratifies a minimum activity standard for full voting power. The baseline tracks, per delegate, over a rolling quarter: • percentage of eligible votes cast • whether votes include public reasoning, not just a yes/no • response rate to direct constituent questions on live proposals • attendance or participation in scheduled governance calls, where applicable • conflicts of interest disclosed for proposals where relevant This is not a popularity score. It is a floor for what “active representation” means. 2. Reasoning transparency, not just vote counts A delegate who votes on everything with no explanation is not meaningfully more accountable than one who is inactive. The license requires a short public rationale attached to votes on material proposals, meaning anything above a defined budget or authority threshold. This does not need to be long. It needs to exist and be specific to the proposal, not a copy-pasted template. 3. Gradual voting power decay for inactivity Instead of a hard cutoff, voting power tied to delegation decays gradually when a delegate falls below the activity baseline for two consecutive quarters. Decay is proportional and public, not punitive or sudden. A delegate who returns to active participation stops the decay and can rebuild standing over time. This avoids two bad outcomes: delegates being harshly and instantly cut off for a single bad quarter, and delegates holding meaningful power indefinitely with zero recent engagement. 4. Constituent-side visibility, not just delegate-side reporting Delegators should not have to dig through forum history to know if their delegate is still active. A public dashboard shows, per delegate, current activity status, decay status if applicable, and a link to recent voting rationale. This makes redelegation an informed choice rather than a guess. 5. Independent review without a popularity contest A small independent reviewer group checks that the activity data is accurate and that the decay mechanism is applying correctly, not whether any individual delegate’s votes were good or bad. Judging vote quality is left to tokenholders. Judging whether the system is measuring activity honestly is the reviewer’s job. 6. Renewal and reset Every two quarters, the license standard itself gets reviewed. Thresholds that turn out to be too strict or too loose get adjusted based on real data, not guessed in advance and left untouched for years. Adoption path 1. Publish the activity baseline and reasoning-transparency standard within 30 days of approval. 2. Stand up the public delegate dashboard within 60 days. 3. Begin the first activity-tracking quarter, with decay mechanics inactive during this first cycle so delegates have visibility before consequences apply. 4. Activate decay starting the second tracked quarter. 5. Review and adjust thresholds every two quarters based on observed data. Requested budget: $110,000 for a two-quarter pilot covering dashboard build, activity tracking infrastructure, independent review, and public reporting. Pilot deliverables: • public delegate activity and reasoning dashboard • documented activity baseline and decay formula • one full tracked quarter with decay inactive, for calibration • one full quarter with decay active • independent reviewer process confirming data accuracy • public report on outcomes and recommended threshold adjustments Why this is not duplicative This is not a delegate compensation program and does not touch delegate pay. It is not a reputation or ranking system that scores delegates against each other. It only answers one question: is voting power still attached to someone actively representing it, or has it gone quiet and stayed powerful anyway. What would change our mind This proposal is unnecessary if ENS already has a working, enforced standard connecting delegate voting power to ongoing activity and public reasoning, with real consequences for prolonged inactivity. If that exists, fund strengthening it instead. If it does not, this is the missing piece between electing delegates once and actually being represented by them continuously. Budget logic $110,000 covers a proper dashboard build, two full tracked quarters, and independent verification, rather than a spreadsheet someone maintains until they get busy too. It is modest relative to the amount of governance power currently sitting with delegates nobody is actively checking on. Picture a delegate who won a meaningful chunk of delegated ENS eighteen months ago on the strength of a strong platform post. They voted actively for the first two quarters, then took on a demanding job and quietly stopped engaging. They never resigned. They never announced a pause. Their voting power just sat there, fully intact, attached to a wallet that hasn’t cast a vote or posted reasoning in over a year. Nobody did anything wrong here. The delegate didn’t break a promise, and the delegators who chose them didn’t make a bad call at the time. But right now there is no mechanism that distinguishes this delegate from one who is still fully engaged. Both show up identically in a snapshot of voting power. Under this license, that delegate’s dashboard entry would show clear inactivity after two quarters, decay would begin, and anyone who delegated to them would see it plainly instead of having to notice on their own. Common objections, addressed directly “This punishes delegates for having a busy season.” Decay is gradual, not a cliff, and only starts after two consecutive quarters below baseline. A single slow quarter, a vacation, a demanding work stretch, none of that triggers anything. The mechanism is built for sustained absence, not normal life variation. “Delegates might just vote on everything to avoid decay, without actually engaging.” This is why the reasoning-transparency requirement exists alongside the vote-count baseline. Relationship to existing delegate programs This does not replace delegate compensation, onboarding, or election processes. Programs that pay delegates, train new delegates, or run delegate elections continue exactly as they are. This license only adds an ongoing check between elections, so voting power doesn’t operate on a “set it and forget it” basis for eighteen months or more at a time. It also complements any Foundation accountability or key-continuity proposals under discussion. Those focus on staff, custody, and operational roles. This one focuses on the tokenholder-elected side of governance, which has had comparatively little structural accountability by comparison. Edge cases the license needs to handle • Delegates who are transparently on a declared hiatus should be able to flag this publicly and pause decay for a defined window, rather than being treated identically to silent inactivity. • New delegates in their first quarter should not be measured against the same baseline before they’ve had a full tracked cycle. • Delegates managing unusually large or contentious portfolios may need reasoning-transparency thresholds calibrated differently than delegates handling routine proposals, which the two-quarter review cycle can adjust for. Hereto, A vote cast once, a delegation made once, should not turn into permanent unaccountable power. Representation is supposed to be a relationship, not a one-time transaction. If voting power should be earned by participation, it should also require participation to keep.