Decentralized Governance of the IoTeX Network
At IoTeX, our mission is to empower an Internet of Trusted Things — an open, borderless ecosystem where humans and machines can interact with verifiable privacy and trust. Turning our vision into reality requires not only robust technology and tokenomics...
At IoTeX, our mission is to empower an Internet of Trusted Things — an open, borderless ecosystem where humans and machines can interact with verifiable privacy and trust. Turning our vision into reality requires not only robust technology and tokenomics, but also decentralized governance to ensure IoTeX provides value to its users and stakeholders, not profit-hungry institutions.
Today, we are excited to share our plans for decentralized governance of the IoTeX Network, including the formation of the IoTeX Governance Working Group. Throughout this multi-stage journey, we invite all IoTeX stakeholders to help us design the foundation for community-driven governance.
In this blog, we share our roadmap and initial design for decentralized governance of the IoTeX Network.
Why Decentralized Governance?
IoTeX is a digital democracy where the voice of the community is the driver of change. The fact that any stakeholder can propose, debate, and vote for changes is a core principle embedded into our governance design. In the future, all IoTeX stakeholders will have the ability to evangelize and implement their ideas without requiring permission from the IoTeX Foundation or anyone else — a truly open ecosystem where the best ideas win! Transitioning from a Foundation-led to a community-owned network will remove any single points of failure and allow IoTeX to evolve safely, rapidly, and collectively.
On-chain Governance Framework
Governance begins with the IOTX coin, which has various utilities in the IoTeX Network. One important utility of IOTX is token-holders can stake it to earn the right to vote and participate in network governance. In the future, anyone will be able to bring proposals to a network-wide vote after receiving sufficient community support.
Anyone with an idea can submit a proposal on-chain, which the community can review and support. Once a quorum (i.e., threshold of support) is reached, the proposal will move forward to a network-wide vote. If enough stakeholders vote and the majority of votes are in favor, the proposal will be confirmed and actioned by the IoTeX Foundation and developer groups. Typical proposals include:
- Policy Proposals are qualitative in nature, where implementation requires reasonable technical effort. For example, re-allocating staking rewards across block and epoch rewards.
- Technical Proposals must include executable schemes and code, not just ideas for others to implement. For example, moving from 5-sec to 1-sec block time sounds great but is complex in practice.
Technical Design & Smart Contracts
As we design our decentralized governance framework, a committee of Foundation, developers, and community will be formed to bring new proposals to vote in the short-term. The technical design of our governance framework is based on transparent smart contracts, which will evolve over time. Currently, each “proposal” is called an “issue”, which is composed of four main components:
- OffChainIssueRegistration contract serves as the “registration desk” for all issues.
- After creation, an instance of OffchainIssue will be created with all proposal details, such as the IPFS link to the proposal, hash of its content, submission date, and so on.
- Once an issue is approved by the committee, voters can vote via https://member.iotex.io/polls
- AdhocIssueSheet contract stores organizes all issues that have been approved, started, paused, or ended by quorum.
- RotatableWeightedVPS contract records all staking information in the native staking v2 subprotocol every 25 hours, which tells an OffchainIssue how to count votes.
Contracts deployed on IoTeX Mainnet:
RotatableWeightedVPS: io1476tz4nx8v8qc5xdpu3hclk0uyanus6x2laddq
OffChainIssueRegistration: io17nq7vnm3wcs5a2cmhwhcnhwtwv4s6lxuv7qqj5
AdhocIssueSheet: io1j05ta0krxvpwc4kv2duyjfuyxglqyxkasp3pm9
What’s Next
Over the coming months, we look forward to working alongside the community to begin the transition towards decentralized governance. As the foundation for the Internet of Trusted Things, IoTeX believes deeply in the power of blockchain to empower everyday people and businesses — this requires governance that works for users and stakeholders, not greedy institutions. We are committed to bringing the same level of focus that we apply to our technology to governance in order to ensure the perpetual growth of IoTeX.
If you are interested in shaping the future of IoTeX, please consider joining the IoTeX Governance Working Group, which is open to all IoTeX stakeholders. Let’s build the future together!
About IoTeX
Founded as an open-source platform in 2017, IoTeX is building the Internet of Trusted Things, an open ecosystem where all “things” — humans, machines, businesses, and DApps — can interact with trust and privacy. Backed by a global team of 30+ top research scientists and engineers, IoTeX combines blockchain, secure hardware, and confidential computing to enable next-gen IoT devices, networks, and economies. IoTeX will empower the future decentralized economy by “connecting the physical world, block by block”.