What Happened at Pickle?
This morning there was an incident at Pickle Finance.
In keeping with my positive experience with this project, both moderators and the wider community responded coolly and capably. Keep up the good work guys.
So what happened?
It started with PIP19, a proposal to reallocate rewards following the end of Uniswap liquidity mining. The community has been highly engaged here, debating whether to prioritise boosting BTC rewards, stable coins, or a balance between the two.
Today the vote moved to Snapshot, with community members signalling the direction of incentives.
The system uses Quadratic Voting, a technique designed to minimise the influence whales can have in swaying decisions.
The controversy emerged when community members noticed that a user had split their LP funds into multiple different wallets in advance of the vote. The user was easily identified by recognisable ENS names as one of the discord moderators.
This gamification of the voting process circumvents the effectiveness of quadratic voting, increasing the individual’s weight in the decision and calling into question the democratic process.
Moving Forwards
I’ve been working closely with the Pickle community recently, both as a PieDAO representative for our upcoming DDP index, as a marketer, and as a Pickle community member.
The project’s offerings are valuable and branding excellent, but what shines through once again for me here is Pickle’s incredible community spirit.
The individual was removed from the Pickle Finance multisig, but was encouraged to remain a valued community member and moderator, and the wider community engaged in a thoughtful and constructive debate around the limitations of the current voting design.
The takeaway from the incident is a clear recognition that current voting designs are far from perfect. This is an area all DeFi communities need to take seriously. On the one hand efforts must be made to minimise whale voting and plutocracy, but solutions like quadratic voting need to operate in ways that cannot easily be gamed.
Once again, today’s news demonstrate just how early we are, and I remain positive that democratic processes will continue to develop and evolve as we move forwards together.
Join the Pickle Finance discord.