[Temperature Check] HIP 0: Hop Mission Statement and Success Framework

[cwhinfrey]

Background

Forum Discussion: https://forum.hop.exchange/t/discussion-hop-s-mission-and-primary-success-metric/234

Discord Discussion: https://discord.com/channels/789310208413270078/988600846877065316/988614962534572072

Proposal

Adopt the following mission statement and success framework.

Mission Statement

Hop DAO’s mission is to drive the adoption of secure, trustless, and community-owned bridge infrastructure within Ethereum’s scaling ecosystem and to connect Ethereum to the broader multi-chain world.

Success Framework

Hop DAO’s success should be judged first and foremost by its ability to provide bridge infrastructure that is secure, trustless, and community-owned. Any shortcomings concerning these values should be considered a failure in Hop DAO’s mission.

Beyond adhering to these core values, Hop DAO’s success should be measured by monthly volume. When available, monthly volume can be referenced as a percentage of market share to limit noise from market-wide factors. In other contexts, monthly volume can be referenced in absolute terms.

Ongoing Refinement

If this mission statement and success framework are adopted, additions and changes should be encouraged. More clearly defining what it means to be secure, trustless, and community-owned through subsequent proposals could help inform governance discussions and drive meaningful action towards these goals in the future.

In addition, monthly volume only serves as a good metric for Hop’s token bridge. If Hop DAO decided to open up Hop’s messaging layer for generalized use or add any other type of protocol offering, the success framework should be amended.

Lastly, Hop DAO may want to broaden or alter its mission statement in the future. This should also be encouraged when there is community support. The mission statement is meant to signal the current goals of the Hop community and not serve as a doctrine to which the community is bound.

Motivation

Define a mission statement and success framework to serve as the basis for future proposal discussions.

Voting

Yes - Adopt the mission statement and success framework

No - No action

[dybsy]

The emphasis on ‘community-owned’ is necessary and very nice to see. I think this is a concise, straight-forward mission statement that does a good job of capturing what this protocol and its community is all about. As an aside, I am curious about the possibilities of expanding upon the messaging layer, and wonder what use cases have been identified to date or might be feasible going forward?

[cwhinfrey]

Use cases for a messaging layer include:

1. Custom token bridges - Many projects want to support bridging more natively than providing liquidity for a Hop bridge. For example Synthetix’s cross-chain synth transfers (WIP) will rely on a messaging layer to allow burning synths on one chain to trigger the minting of synths on another.
2. NFT bridge - An NFT bridge would require a base messaging layer to communicate between chains.
3. Cross-chain applications in general - Cross-chain applications will require cross-chain messaging to access the full application state. For example a cross-chain defi application may need to know what the balances of all of its pools are to trigger a rebalance.

[lefterisjp]

Left a question in the discussion post. Perhaps here should have been the right place?

Discussion: Hop’s Mission and Primary Success Metric

I agree with the mission statement in general. Only got 1 question. How would you define community owned and how would you judge its success?

[cwhinfrey]

Yeah, that thread is a bit stale but I followed up there. Would love to hear your own thoughts (and others) on what “community owned” means too.

Discussion: Hop’s Mission and Primary Success Metric

How would you define community owned and how would you judge its success? This is a great question! Like I said in the temperature check post, I think it would be beneficial for the DAO to discuss and more clearly define what it means to be secure, trustless, and community-owned so it’s great to see this. Here are my thoughts on what community ownership means and the current state of DAOs as a starting point: There should be checks and balances between contributors, participants, and token…

The mission statement could eventually be amended with a more clear definition of “community ownership” to help inform future proposal discussions.

[0xhoratius]

“community owned” for we means that community members actually own the network, hence the HOP token. If this is indeed the goal, there needs to be gradual distribution of token to the community, either from treasury or via inflation.

Currently most of the tokens are in hands of insiders + airdrop hunters + hunters of airdrop hunters . Not trying to say it is bad, this is the reality of token distribution of any new project.

Decentralization is hard and lengthy process, but I would imagine doable by slowly and judiciously distributing token from inflation / treasury to community members who are active and help the network grow. This may be done somewhat automatically, but more automatic == more gameable.

I would trust the team here to make judicious calls. Is there a good precedence for “community owned” ETH project or best practices how to get there?