Exceptional Claim Process for Early Contributors Who Missed the Deadline

[stefa2k]

Preamble

Thank you for bringing this topic up! It’s good to see meaningful proposals like this one. I’m neither for nor against this proposal as of writing this post, I’m missing feedback and information which I’d be happy to read up on!

Review

@seydinasall

This proposal suggests the introduction of a one-time, time-limited claiming grace period or a manual claiming process for verified early contributors who were unable to claim their Obol tokens before the May 2nd deadline due to exceptional and verifiable circumstances (e.g., unstable internet, socioeconomic hardship, regional infrastructure limitations).

There are a bunch of things I wanna address from this paragraph:

• Do you suggest a “time-limited claiming grace period” or a “manual claiming process” or both?

• The verifiable circumstances would be manually verified, because they are real-life events. This would be a significant effort. I’m also hesitant to believe there are many people who have no internet for 90 days and have been engaged to Obol before.

• The period to claim was 90 days. 3 months is a significant time to read up on and claim Obol tokens if the claimer is interested and keeps up with the project. One could argue that missing the 90 days window to claim is also a sign of not following the project close enough.

• To my knowledge there were announcements on X, Discord, Telegram and Obol’s blog. The content was also redistributed by other prominent parties.

@seydinasall

Impact on Decentralization Goals

Reallocating these tokens to the treasury rather than the original contributors affects validator diversity and undermines grassroots trust.

I strongly agree with this. Regions with unfavorable conditions are not to left out.

@seydinasall

Time-limited Reopening

A short window (e.g., 7 days) for verified users to claim manually or through a simplified process.

My feeling is looking for a permanent solution would be the best approach. Otherwise we might need an exception from the exception and so on.

Other things I noticed about this proposal:

• Proposals should be concrete & precise. To me there are a lot of variables missing, precise dates, durations, specific criteria for late claimers, … I’m happy to help here but would love to get a better understanding first.

• I’d also suggest – in the event of this proposal getting through – to deduct the efforts and expenses of the Obol team to implement this proposal from the token pool distribution. Meaning, the late claimers would receive less than the ones that claimed in time.

• It stands out that people missed the 90-day claim window but made a proposal the day after TGE.

• My very subjective and limited view is that this proposal might only affect a handful of people, and some of them might not even know about the TGE yet.