Hi! I wanna share a concern about the gas fees for voting, given the 0.1 GLMR per transaction the amount can be more than $1 depending on market conditions.
It’s important to consider whether the average person would be willing to pay such fees to participate in the voting process.
Discussing ways to mitigate or reduce these fees might make voting more accessible and inclusive.
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I think it’s a nice suggestion!
Although relative costs in $ are currently really low, as you said, this may change in the future.
I’m not sure about the technical feasibility, especially in terms of preventing abuse, or whether this is planned by openGov. On the other hand, this could probably improve participation of small holders to the decentralized governance of the chain.
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I know that there are some weight issues in gas calculation that are going to be fixed in the next runtime.
For example the high gas for delegation of openGov voting power.
Maybe voting is included, maybe voting could be included?
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tbh, I hadn’t heard that this was an issue, leading community to avoid participating in governance. however, voting delegation can address this concern. with voting delegation, users would be required to pay fees twice, once when choosing a delegate and again if they decide to undelegate. the delegate, in turn, will cover all these fees. If we discuss eliminating gas fees, then we should ask ourselves who will bear the costs. Indeed, we can use a call permit precompile, but someone will invariably bear the fees, whether it’s the user or a third party. in addition, we must remember that 80% of the spent gas is burned. which in general benefits the whole protocol, because, in a sense, burning creates deflationary pressure
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we have funded a huge list of projects, including a parachain. I don’t think finding this funds is an issue or less important. Additionally, I believe we can reduce collators’ revenue from 20% to 18% and allocate that for gasless purposes.
Also i think its not yet an issue but could be in the future if glmr price rise, if we agree on that.
Another consideration is of the anti-spam mechanism gas serves. If there were no gas fees for voting (or they were paid externally to the voter) how would you prevent someone spamming the chain with constantly changing votes? Don’t allow changing the votes? Allow a limited number of changes? Why should somebody be limited in changing their mind? This new data field would also need to be stored somewhere.
Possibly the first vote could paid, but then you would be punishing a user for changing their mind.
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Well, this is a valid concern. So, I think we could find a way to set some parameters, as you mentioned. For instance, the first vote could be refunded, and if any accounts have a good voting record, they could be eligible for others. I can see on the delegation page that there are some score points we could leverage this; it’s worth considering an investment in this as governance is a hot topic.
there is a specific allocation set aside for grants, so I’m not quite sure how community and ecosystem grants relate to this, but alright. overall, I think the case isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. we could also argue that staking txs could be covered by Foundation, given that staking is a fundamental part of the protocol. In general, the Foundation has come up with an excellent solution in the form of voting delegation. I believe this will undoubtedly increase the number of gov participants. furthermore, users won’t have to cover a multitude of tx fees to vote because the delegate will cover them. at this time, i don’t see this as an issue at all
Sure this is not a concern until glmr price is 18 c pal.
I believe this could alleviate the issue.
`Thanks for flagging. The gas used by a voting transaction is roughly 1.08 M gas which is a bit high in terms of regular EVM transactions.
I’ve flagged this to the core dev team as this might be an issue of benchmarking the calls in terms of “Substrate”.
This means, in Substrate, calls consume execution time and another metric related to storage, measured in picoseconds, this is what it is referred to as “weight”. Then, we use a constant that transforms this weight into gas.
If the benchmarks, or what it is done to measure the execution time, for the voting extrinsics is not correctly tuned, you might be “overpaying” in terms of fees for voting.
Thanks again for reporting.
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Thank you team, very Bullish news!!! 
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great explanation, thanks Alberto!
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