My apologies for jumping into this discussion so late. I just wanted to share a few observations on Summer Governance based on the January 2026 period.
To kick off, I wanted to highlight what are considered some of the most prominent reasons for a DAO to employ delegate compensation. A quick AI prompt returned the following:
- Improve participation (Low voter turnout)
- Recognize Delegate Work (Reward for time-intensive tasks like proposal creation, deliberation, and informed voting)
- Enhance Decentralization (Distribute power beyond whales)
From the above chart, we can see that we have very impressive participation metrics (averaging 432.87% of the quorum in January). This metric took a hit post-transferability, but levels still remain healthy. The drop in the last 5 votes can also be explained by the absence of StableLab’s voting block.
Recognizing delegate work is where, as @Curia highlighted, work needs to be done, as rewards are only distributed for voting participation as it stands. And as can be seen from the chart above, only 1 delegate (holds 150% of quorum) has been able to consistently hit quorum on all the votes in January. If this delegate were to stop participating, it would still require only 2 delegates on average to hit quorum.
Enhancing decentralization also needs significant work, as the current Nakamoto coefficient (minimum number of entities that would need to collude to control >50% of voting power) is only 1. But this is a tricky problem considering the amounts controlled by whale delegates.
My Recommendations
- Determine what delegate rewards are meant to incentivize. What goal are we trying to achieve with delegate compensation? Things like participation are currently very healthy.
- Improve decentralization: If the top 5 delegates don’t participate for whatever reason, quorum becomes much harder to reach. My suggestion here would be to run a delegate race, where treasury delegations are given to delegates who are active in governance but who have low voting power.
- Dynamic pay as suggested by @curia. My suggestion here would be to allocate rewards based on the type of SIP. For example, voting on onboarding and offboarding of fleets and arks is considerably low effort, given that BA has usually already conducted sufficient risk analysis.
- Cap rewards or delegates getting rewarded. Basically, create a mechanism to be able to more predictably budget delegate rewards.
- Finally, I think we should look to reward proposal creation (successful ones). With DAO-managed vaults right around the corner, it is a good idea to reward delegates who can successfully suggest and integrate new yield sources.
Apologies for the very long post 
. As always, I am happy to help design/co-design any of the above frameworks and recommendations.