The Spartan Council election

The election for Spartan Council members begins less than 24 hours from now! Over the last two weeks, nineteen members of the Synthetix community have nominated themselves to be on the Spartan Council, a new component of Synthetix governance, and seven will be voted on successfully for the first Council Epoch, the month of December.

The Spartan Council will be responsible for approving proposed changes to the Synthetix protocol. Initially, this will only include SCCPs (i.e. configurable changes, such as changing exchange rates or the target C-Ratio), but the aim is to also include SIPs (i.e. more complex changes to the protocol) in the future.

As of last month, this step is currently carried out on Snapshot through off-chain token signatures with quadratic weighting. Previous to that, it was performed in Discord by community members who had been contributing to conversation for more than three months, with a one-member-one-vote weighting. This is still how SIP’s are voted on.

The Spartan Council will be a community-elected group responsible for this step, signalling whether or not the protocolDAO should implement any protocol updates added to the SIP’s repository. The protocolDAO will still retain the discretion to not enact a detrimental change to the protocol if a malicious actor somehow manages to get a proposal through governance (read Kain’s views on this trade-off).

The role will be a paid one, worth 1000 SNX per month per Council member. It will initially be paid by the synthetixDAO for at least the first three months of the Council. Elections will initially be held every month.

You can view the nominees on Boardroom and click on a nominee to read their campaign pitch as outlined in Discord.

To vote in the election, SNX holders will need to have been staking at the last fee period snapshot before the start of the election (Wednesday, November 25). Each staking wallet will be able to vote for one nominee, and a wallet’s vote weighting takes their staking debt at the relevant snapshot and multiplies it quadratically like outlined in SIP-90.

Voting will take place on Snapshot at https://council.synthetix.io. Council members will vote on SCCP’s at https://gov.synthetix.io.

Voting begins Tuesday December 1, 00:00 UTC, and lasts seven days. A voter can amend their vote before the end of the voting period.

Elected Council members will receive a limited edition NFT with the following design from Sam Gilmore:

The protocolDAO is responsible for issuing and retracting the NFT’s (which confer voting rights) in line with the regular election results.

If you have any more questions about how the process works, there are further details concerning the Spartan Council available in SIP-93. Alternatively, come join the conversation in Discord!