Tollgate Fee - Deep Dive

🤖 TEC Dandelion Voting
#1

Tollgate Fee

What the heck is a tollgate fee? Searching ‘tollgate’ in the dandelion tech spec has 0 results! So all I know about it is that in our test hatch it was set to 3 wxDAI(~$36.00USD at time of writing). Upon further investigation (and help from @Tonga) I found the aragon template for a tollgate contract.

According the repo above, the purpose of tollgate is:

A simple Aragon App forwarder that requires a user to deposit fees before executing an action.
Useful for when an organization wants to make actions public, but impose a customizable cost to prevent spam.

Some questions to consider:

  1. What is the minimum amount and should it be constant?
  2. Should it just be for the public and to prevent spam?
  3. Could it be used to manipulate outcome?
  4. How independent is this parameter? What other parameters are connected to it?
  5. What other factors should we consider when deciding this parameter?
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Dandelion Voting Parameters General Discussion
2. 📚 Glossary of Terms
Upgrade Impact Hours App
TEC TEST Hatch Implementation Specification
#2

The way I see it, this is parameter reduces the influence of the ‘public’ and ‘possible bad actors/spam’. Because it creates a very small barrier to voting for non-trusted members. This is a super cool concept, but I would be concerned about the subtleties of the implementation.

  1. The aragon template is not audited yet, this is new and experimental tech.
  2. 3 wxDAI seems like a lot of money! I would love for someone to flesh out the game theory / cryptoeconomics here. What is the incentive for the public to participate in TEC actions? How does a fee influence that incentive?
  3. How exactly do we differentiate the ‘public’? Is that people who do not have CSTK tokens? Or TEC tokens?
  4. Manipulation is super important to consider here. I think that mitigating potential manipulation is THE POINT of this parameter. We want to reduce the amount of influence that external actors may take in the ecosystem by introducing this fee. This fee incentivizes interested parties to become trusted members.
  5. This parameter is pretty isolated, it could be added or removed without effecting other parameters.
  6. I think this parameter is super juicy for modeling, I see it as a resistance parameter for external influence. It’s also an additional source of revenue into the… funding pool? Or where does the fee even go? And is it returned at least partially to the voter?
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#3

My responses.
2.- As far as I know, wxDai stands for wrapped xDai, so 1 wxDai = 1 xDai wich is = 1 Dai and = 1 USD so tollgate fee would be equivalent to $3.
3.- Only CSTK token holders will be voting and participating in the first (hatch) DAO

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#4

Is this xDai or something different?

#5

xDai is XDAI network native token which has 1:1 parity with DAI token in Ethereum mainnet.
xDai is the token used to pay gas cost in XDAI network.
STAKE is the governance token for XDAI network, STAKE token is what is shown in CoinMarketCap.

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#6

Thanks Santigs, that’s super clear and important to know.

#7

The TollGate Fee is an interesting method of preventing spam and unwanted proposals.

However, having such a low TollGate Fee may be problematic for the Dandelion DAO if we do not take into consideration the Vote Buffer and Vote Execution Delay parameters.

I’m not sure if I’m ‘off’ in my thinking here, but if the VED and VB parameters are too short we undermine the “rage-quit” function by not giving members enough time to remove funds between (nefarious) proposals…but if these parameters are too long, combined with a 3wxDAI TollGate Fee, could I not just spam delay the execution of the proposals (required for Upgrade) for a long period of time?

All this to ask, is there a downside to having a really high TollGate Fee, especially if we know exactly how many parameters and proposals need to be voted on to execute the Upgrade to the Commons?

Also, I second ygg’s question on where these fee’s end up in this system.