Need for Clarity on Astar Network’s Governance Models

Governance
1

Hi All,

With the recent creation of the Community Council there has been a large increase in governance topics/conversations taking place on the forum. From a user’s perspective, this is very encouraging. However, I feel there are some critical issues impacting the efficiency, effectiveness, and inclusivity of the current governance model.

Currently, the governance model appears fragmented and lacks clear guidelines, creating confusion and inconsistencies. I would like to outline some of the challenges and seek guidance, especially form the both those currently in charge of governance within the Core Team and those on the newly formed Community Council (@AstarHood and @Mouthmouth68) on how we can improve the process.

1. Fragmented Governance Platforms

Governance activities are scattered across three platforms:

Each platform has its own mechanism for proposals, discussions, and voting, but there’s no clear instruction or guidance on how these platforms should be used in silos or in tandem. For example:

  • Anyone can submit a proposal on any platform without cross-listing it across the others.
  • Discussions related to the same proposal might happen on all three platforms, leading to scattered and duplicated efforts.
  • Anyone can propose a vote on either Subsquare or Townhall with little to no discussion.

This lack of integration creates confusion about where to engage and undermines the governance process’s effectiveness.

2. Lack of a Unified Proposal Process

For various governance matters, the process is inconsistent:

  • dApp Staking: Discussions are often initiated on the forum with voting taking place in-thread, however, voting can happen on either on Subsquare or Townhall and look to be moving off forum to these two governance sites.
  • Unstoppable Community Grants (UCG) and delisting votes: These are primarily hosted on Subsquare, but delisting votes can also occur on Townhall.

Additionally, both Townhall and Subsquare have discussion sections that overlap with the forum, further complicating where discussions should take place.

3. Confusing Voting Mechanisms

The voting styles differ across platforms, which could lead to conflicting outcomes depending on where a vote takes place:

  • Astar Forum: One account, one vote.
  • Townhall: One Astar equals one vote, However, voting power only considers native Astar and and does not allow for EVM wallets to partake in governance.
  • Subsquare: Voting power is calculated as a multiple of Astar holdings, and it allows proxy voting and allows both Native and EVM wallets to participate.

These inconsistencies can skew results:

  • Forum polls are susceptible to fake or multiple accounts.
  • Townhall votes favour Native holders and exclude EVM holders due to voting power based on Astar balance.
  • Subsquare’s proxy voting centralizes power in a few delegated wallets while the token locking will benefit larger wallets that can delay use of their tokens.

4. Low Participation and Awareness

Participation in governance is significantly lower than expected compared to the total user base and Astar holdings in wallets. This lack of engagement exacerbates the issues mentioned above as well as includes the following:

  • Users may not know that all three platforms exist or how to use them.
  • Governance outcomes may be dominated by a small subset of users, leading to less representative decisions.

Suggestions and Questions

To address these issues, we need:

  1. A unified and transparent governance framework that defines:
  • Where proposals should be submitted and discussed.
  • A streamlined process for moving from discussion to voting.
  1. Standardized voting mechanisms to ensure consistency and fairness.
  2. Greater community outreach to educate users about governance and encourage participation.

I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts and suggestions on:

  • How we can integrate or streamline the governance platforms.
  • Ways to standardize and improve the voting process.
  • Strategies to increase participation and awareness.

Thanks for reading this far, and looking forward to everyone’s feedback.

*Edit: Spelling/Grammar fixes.

2 Likes
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I don’t see anything wrong with having more than one council with different personalities, just as real councils do.
However, it would be necessary to define the process by which the voting power of each council arises and what the position of each resolution is(Including which council will ultimately have priority).

On top of that, we should establish a protocol for the community to vote on something, and to make it reasonable, no more than three councils should be needed, and they should be organized into no more than two.

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I think we agree on the whole. I’m not concerned with councils at the moment. I am concerned with the inconsistent methods of undertaking governance.

There are currently 3 methods of proposing and voting on issues, all of which are inconsistent with each other in terms of what a vote is and who can vote. This is what I would like to see discussed and possible solutions provided for.

1 Like
4

Thanks a lot for your post.

Foundation stands is currently as following as stated in the article: https://astar.network/blog/astar-onchain-governance-153

For those already familiar with Astar offchain governance through Astar Gov (Townhall), all discussions and proposals—both onchain and offchain—can now be seamlessly managed on Subsquare. While the Astar Forum remains a valuable space for broader community engagement, Subsquare is now the centralized hub for all governance activities, with:

  • Onchain proposals handled under the Democracy section
  • Offchain discussions facilitated in the Discussions section

The recent use of Townhall was because a certain feature was not yet possible to do on Subsquare:

Voting will open tomorrow. After reconsideration, we’ve decided to conduct the vote on Astar Gov (Townhall). Initially, we planned to use Subsquare, but it doesn’t offer voting power based on tokens or multiple options. Since these features are available on Astar Gov, we have chosen it for this vote.
Source: Introducing the Community Council - #13 by Gaius_sama

In short: Subsquare is the only place that will be seen as source of truth!

I identify this as a common issue in the current web3 landscape. Everyone is shouting for a governance system and decentralization but only a few actively participate. I do understand this because it takes time and the ROI is limited. What we will do from Foundation is to make sure that we keep promoting our governance systems through our socials, community, projects, etc…

Highlight the possibility to delegate your votes to some delegators that can be your voice if you trust them based on their actions and interactions on the forum and voting participation: Subsquare | Astar Delegation

We are just getting started with the full onchain governance so I do expect some time to get it more embedded in our daily habits.

To recap on my view:

  1. Only Subsquare is recognized by Astar Foundation as hub for every related to onchain proposals. The forum is purely for discussions, not voting!
  2. We follow the standardization mentioned here, related to the different councils: Technical Guide | Welcome to Astar
  3. Keep actively promoting and increase its visibility
5 Likes
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Getting more users involved in governance would be a challenge. I hope we get more people involved in delegation. It doesn’t have to be much but every delegation matters.

Hope that we can soon reach a treshold of +100 votes on each proposal.
Looking forward to this.

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6

This is an excellent thread.

As you say, it is complicated by the multiple governance platforms. However, as described, I assume that Townhall only used it temporarily and will only use Subsquare and Forum in the future.

Since discussions can be held in Subsquare, I personally think it would be better to consolidate the discussion there, but I suspect it will be quite difficult due to the fact that we have been using Forum for a long time.
In fact, many projects are using Forum and the on-chain governance platform in parallel.

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Thats correct.
We are also thinking about revamping a section in our Discord to also share latest topics that are being discussed and share all new proposals from Subsquare.

The forum is still a great place to share the full background of a certain direction or change so it wouldn’t get lost and we have a centralize place available that has the full background/history of Astar.

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IMO this is one of the main challenge we may face with gouvernance :
How to be sure that we get notified of all new openned/update discussion/vote if 2 palteform (here : forum and subsquare) are used.
How can we shorten the time needed for user to review all this new information in order to vote in the best interest of Astar.

Maybe we should creat a group of few people (team of 3), whom mission would be to create short video and/or article and/or X post and/or animate a Discord channel aboout the various subjects brought on Subsquare (like what’s the Kusamarian is doing for polkadot)

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I’m using the Telegram integration on Subsquare to get notifications. You can enable it through the settings:

image
image2112×1216 164 KB

For the forum I’m using RSS notifications.
Subsquare informed us that they are working on the Discord integration.

This would be a great task if the Community Council is open for this to also create those overviews to set example. Maybe later another team can take this over through treasury funding similar as Kusamarian.

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That said, we should spread the word over the community and incentivize the proposals discussion on Subsquare to make things easier.

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