Homebase Introduces A New Delegation Feature

Homebase has become the go-to application for all things DAOs on Tezos. By vastly limiting the technical know-how required to interact with blockchain-based applications, Homebase has continued to make it easy for new users to come in and spin up a DAO on Tezos in mere minutes.

Recently, we’ve been introduced to yet another update to the Homebase platform. There has been a new feature added where users now have the ability to delegate their FA2 tokens which can then be used in off-chain polling via the platform.

In this article, we’ll dive further into the new feature and show you how to get started!

Introducing Delegation #

Previously, there were two separate apps within the Homebase ecosystem. There was the main Homebase application which included Lambda DAOs and all the benefits of having a fully operational DAO on Tezos mainnet.

Conversely, there was a separate application called “Homebase Lite”. Homebase Lite was tailored more towards polling and getting a pulse of sensitive issues through an off-chain means in a method that resembled popular solutions like Snapshot on Ethereum.

These two apps have since merged into the main application, where users can have the option to spin up a full DAO or Lite DAO. This is important to note as with the recently introduced delegation feature, it applies to off-chain polling that is done through a snapshot-like feature within the Lite DAO.

It’s worth noting that when users go to create a full DAO, the functionality of the Lite DAO will be present which gives users a lot of flexibility, such as on-chain proposals being executed based on the result of an off-chain poll or the ability to enable delegated voting.

For this specific feature, within a full DAO, you now have the ability to change your delegation settings in the user section of a newly created full DAO for off-chain voting. The delegation mechanism lives in a modified FA2 token and your governance token needs to be able to support delegation, so if the token was created through Homebase’s dashboard it will be supported.

Since this feature only applies to off-chain voting, if you happen to have a DAO that’s been created previously you will not be able to see this feature. Additionally, this feature is also available within Lite DAOs, however, dashboard support for Lite DAOs will be coming soon.

How Do I Create a Delegation-Enabled DAO? #

In order to start delegating you’ll need to have voting weight, which will require having a supported governance token for the DAO in question. Using the Homebase governance token creation wizard to create the token for your new DAO ensures it will be fully supported for the delegation feature.

After successfully creating your governance token, you can now create a full DAO by clicking on the ‘Create DAO’ box and highlighting ‘Full DAO’. You’ll then be asked to provide the token contract address for the token you just created which can be found easily by using your web wallet history and opening TzKT.

After filling in the rest of the details, within the proposals and voting section, you can begin adjusting the parameters of the duration of a proposal or how much approval is needed for it to pass.

Once you’ve successfully completed that step, now you’ll need to adjust the quorum settings for your full DAO.

After successfully completing all those steps, simply review all the settings you’ve made and choose your deployment type. For the sake of this tutorial, I chose ‘Managed’. If you’d like to learn more about the different deployment types, I encourage you to read these docs.

How Do I Delegate? #

After deploying your DAO, head over to the ‘User’ section of the DAO. From there, you will see an option that enables you to change your delegation status for off-chain voting.

By clicking on the ‘Edit’ section, you can now delegate your tokens by entering an address you wish to delegate to.

For off-chain proposals, the voting weight that is used is taken at the block number when the proposal was created. When you create a new proposal, each address associated with the DAO has a current voting power. That voting power will remain the same for the duration of the voting period as far as that specific proposal is concerned.

This is important because essentially a snapshot is taken which disincentivizes various actors from acquiring lots of tokens to influence voting outcomes following the introduction of a new proposal. When you choose to delegate, the settings are stored on-chain within the token’s smart contract of your governance token.

Thanks to help from Tezos Domains, the Homebase team has made it so that using the governance token creation wizard will result in creating a token that is a variation of FA2 that contains additional endpoints. By choosing to delegate, you will lose your ability to vote on a proposal, however, your balance will remain in your wallet.

Looking Forward #

Homebase is becoming the go-to place within the Tezos ecosystem for all your DAO needs. By enabling delegation, users will now have the ability to delegate their FA2 tokens in newly created full DAOs. With dashboard support coming out in the next few weeks for Lite DAOs, make sure to head over to Homebase and get started using this new feature!