There are a lot of chains where a lot of scam proposals are submitted, leading people following the links from these proposals, to lose their precious tokens.
As of now, to push the proposal to the voting period on Jackal, one needs only 1K JKL (around $40 at the moment) to deposit. That is quite a small amount, and even if the proposal is vetoed, the submitters do not lose that much tokens, and it’s quite easy and cheap for scammers to submit scam proposals.
We propose to increase the minimal deposit required to push the proposal to the voting period to 10,000 JKL (around $400 at the moment) as one of the ways to fight scam proposals. This sum is not a fortune, so it’s achievable for a single person or a group of people to collaborate and deposit, but for scammers it’d be 10 times more expensive.
Governance votes
The following items summarise the voting options and what it means for this proposal:
YES - You approve the increase of the minimal deposit fee from 1,000 JKL to 10,000 JKL.
NO - You disapprove of the increase of the minimal deposit fee from 1,000 JKL to 10,000 JKL.
NO WITH VETO - You consider this proposal as irrelevant or spam for the Jackal chain and want to burn depositors’ tokens.
ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to the quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.
I support raising the required deposit to 10k JKL. If it proves to be too small of an amount to deter scam proposals, I think a larger amount is fine as well. That being said, 10k JKL seems like a good initial increase until we see the need for a larger one.
I’m in favour of raising the deposit amount. 10k seems like a good starting point to me. Honestly surprised there hasn’t been a scam prop on chain already with the current deposit price, so this is a really good call.
10,000 JKL is too high, This has proven to not work across Cosmos. This just puts governance out of reach for community members. This is going to be a No from us.
Not to my knowledge. Every chains solution has simply been to raise the minimum which hasn’t worked. On Secret it was raised to like $2k and still they persist. I have suggested revamping governance completely so that one would need to have coins staked to put up proposals and be able to use their stake to put up governances props.
I am pretty sure that although increasing the min deposit for governance won’t completely solve the problem, it will for sure make scammers way more to lose.
Addressing @Seven’s concerns about governance deposit being unaccessible for regular members: there’s always an option to ask others to deposit. I personally had exactly this when I submitted a Cosmos Hub Proposals two weeks ago, and did not have enough tokens by myself, so I asked people who supported this proposal to help me by depositing, and it worked out pretty well (and on Cosmos Hub the min deposit is 250 ATOM, so way more high than suggested here). Additionally, before submitting a proposal, one needs to bootstrap a pre-governance discussion, and this is a quite nice chance to see if people would support it, and can be used to ask others to contribute.
Another points that could be made to prevent scam proposals in the future:
not showing in-deposit proposals on explorers (that’s what Mintscan and Ping.pub do), on other chains (namely, Cosmos Hub) it was quite an issue when someone spammed like 600 proposals and never put them into voting period, but they were still listed, this should prevent it
on explorers, putting a disclaimer before following any links from proposals (that’s what Mintscan does), so if a naive person would see it, chances are they’d be aware that this might be a scam and would reconsider putting their mnemonic or signing random transactions there
raising awareness (by us fellow validators and by the team) about how to be safe in crypto world in all communications channels, maybe writing an article on that or sharing existing ones
if the tokens were already stolen, promoting tools like Cosmoshield and Cosmos Rescue to help victims save their tokens that were staked, and helping pursuing the scammers further
updating the codebase to have a minimal initial deposit (for example on Cosmos Hub the minimal initial deposit is 25 ATOM and the minimal deposit for putting the proposal to voting period is 250 ATOM, so even if you want to submit a scam proposal without intending to put it to voting, you’ll still have to spend 25 ATOM).