Description

This grant, provided by Plurality Labs, was awarded to establish the Plural Research Society and build the first forum and plural voting tools needed to support it. As part of the grant, we will host an experimental plural research workshop where the participants – researchers from across the MEV space – will convene to present their research proposals, discuss and debate using a variety of pluralistic tools, then ultimately vote to decide how to allocate 100,000 ARB in grant funding.

Why the Program Was Funded

This program was designed by Plurality Labs to :

• Create a scalable platform to build upon a successful proof of concept built for Zuzalu
• Leverage the expertise of highly respected advisors to conduct novel research
• Discover if a better forum can drastically improve the quality of conversation
• Use the forum under-the-hood design to allocate funding on a niche, high-expertise topic
• To ensure platforming for a broad selection of researcher opinions in the gas fee optimization and MEV space which has incentives to platform only financially beneficial views

Rounds & Milestones

Milestones 1-3 Build Plural Voting App (complete) – Bespoke mobile-friendly front-end and back-end for private registration via Zupass, gathering registration data, implementation of plural voting and data visualization (100k ARB)

Milestone 4 Populate Research Community (Feb 18th) - Identify and invite top 50-100 MEV researchers to register. Create and disseminate initial marketing. Use plural voting to set agenda for in-person conference (35k ARB)

Milestone 5 Add Forum Functionality (March 8th) - Add plural discussion functionality to tool and hold initial meetup. Prepare venue, logistics, marketing and external plural advisors for May event (35k ARB)

Milestone 6 Host Event and Distribute Grants (May 31st) - Two-day ETH Berlin event May 22-23. Forum, voting and other plural mechanisms used to produce research proposals where participants collaborate across organizations. Votes will allocate grants to best proposals (100k ARB)

N.B. the timeline was updated from the initial proposal as key MEV researchers could not attend ETHDenver

The tool can be viewed at staging.pluralresearch.org

Decision Mechanism

The decision of what to fund is made using a novel forum architecture measuring social distance, providing correlation discounting, and using quadratic voting.

MEV is a topic that only a select few researchers are truly qualified to debate. Based on the professional and education backgrounds of the researchers, they may be inclined to certain schools of thought. An MVP proof-of-concept for this forum was built out for Zuzalu and worked.

The program supports experiments to see if…