Delegating Votes

When you stake your ships, you will receive pilot badges, which grant you voting power within The Citadel DAO. In order to put your votes to good use, you'll first need to delegate them. This article covers the reasoning behind delegation, and the process through which you'll use it.

What's in a pilot badge?

In technical terms, a PilotBadge is a modified ERC20Votes token. In practical terms, a pilot badge is a fungible, non-transferable that gives its owner power over a single vote in The Citadel DAO. By default, this vote is inaccessible and delegated to the zero (null) address. However, a pilot badge holder may use the delegation system to assign their votes (equivalent to the number of pilot badges they hold) to any address: their own, their friend's, or that of a representative they trust. Because the delegation process never transfers any of their pilot badges, they may re-delegate their votes at any time. To avoid double-counting within the delegation system, all changes in voting power are noted through onchain snapshots, and voting power for each proposal is defined by the latest snapshot before the proposal's creation.

Why an extra step?

Delegation has become common practice among onchain governance systems because it allows voters to maximize their impact in governance, without requiring them to spend time and gas voting on each proposal. Instead, like in many real-life governmental systems, they can elect to delegate their votes to representatives that they trust. However, unlike in most real-life systems, they can immediately revoke their delegation, or choose to delegate to themselves from the beginning.

Aside from making participation convenient, vote delegation makes proposal creation attainable for contributors that have fewer ships than are required for the proposal threshold (at the time of writing, 5 ships). For example, even if Heimdall had no ships of his own, he could still submit a proposal for a game addition, as long as he could convince 5 people to temporarily delegate their votes to him (fewer if any hold more than one ship).

How to delegate votes

Through Tally

1. Navigate to the Tally Page for The Citadel DAO.

2. Click the Delegate vote button near the top right of the page content.

If you're delegating to yourself, select Delegate to self and confirm the transaction.

If you're delegating to someone else, select Delegate to address, enter the address to which you're delegating, and confirm the transaction.

Through Etherscan

1. Navigate to the write section for the Pilot Badge contract on Etherscan
2. Connect the wallet that holds your pilot badges to Etherscan

3. Make sure that you have selected the Polygon network in your Ethereum provider (e.g, in the top portion of MetaMask)

4. Open the section for the delegate method and paste the address to which you are delegating your votes (e.g., your own address)

5. Click the Write button and confirm the transaction