The state of Astar governance and our development plans

Astar Astar Initiatives
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I don’t want to sidetrack this discussion too much, but I have some observations I wanted to share based on

my experience

this is a throwaway account :slight_smile:, but I’m an ex-employee from somewhere or other who was on the genesis council for both relay chains and many parachains, and left both Kusama and Polkadot councils at different points in time, largely due to the issues you are trying to avoid recreating. Me and some friends in the ecosystem also ran a small governance experiment with a very different model with largely successful outcomes - that ran out of money :sweat_smile:.

in the rest of the ecosystem. Firstly, I want to commend the commitment you are making to truly decentralize your governance process - as you mentioned, many projects in the ecosystem remove sudo and claim decentralization, but simply operate a council+tech comittee model with their employees taking most of the seats/maintaining decision making power through informal influence - I think the model you are proposing could avoid some of that, but I have my concerns about how your first requirement/solution - giving more voice to builders with a gov token that is rewarded based on dapp staking ratings - would work in practice without careful consideration, and want to point out a pretty glaring issue that doesn’t seem to be addressed anywhere here, really.

The big issue with governance decentralization attempts in this space has always been complexity and cognitive burden - or, as @Jaski proposes:

Things are a little bit different with @hoonkim’s proposal of having a separate, non-transferrable, expiring governance token, but in the larger context as well, I have a different opinion regarding involving token holders only when needed. I believe this leads to outcomes like what we’re seening in OpenGov on Kusama currently - where professional governance delegates and perticipants who are supported by large ecosystem actors end up making all the decisions, and while that sounds like it meets your requirements, of builders and active participants having more influence, in practice it means “organizations and builders focused on engaging in governance, or who have the resources to have resources dedicated to engaging in governance, have a permanent advantage over organizations that focus on building and adding value”. That is obviously an undesired outcome.

An alternative I’ve long been proposing can basically be described as “doing as much onchain as possible, but making it as simple and unobtrusive and minimized as possible”, this is partially about changing the complexity of UX and interactions, but also largely around minimizing the true cost of making decisions and what is at stake when you do.

I assume we agree that:

  • we want every legitimate participant of a governance process to willingly and consistently engage in it.
  • we don’t want it to be possible for non-stakeholders to significantly manufacture consent/cause conflict/sway the decision making process.

The way I see that working is:

  • the process for decision making in governance should be fast, cheap (cognitively and financially), and require little to no “coordination” - this means things like timing of responses within the expected window should have little or no effect on the outcome, this means that participants should be able to make a proposal, or make a decision on a proposal with exclusively information available onchain (identities, proposal metadata) and shouldn’t need to access or participate in, or be aware of offchain information or discussion other than what is linked to from the chain. I see the referenda and delegation pallets as used in opengov a pretty ideal candidate for this, since it’s all about hitting thresholds over time and doesn’t need participants to coordinate on timing or communicate much, but I don’t have a simple solution on how to employ them in a private context.
  • a participant should be able to do everything they need to do regarding governance on the same page, submitting a single transaction, and requiring minimal followup. The way I can imagine this working would be using a single UI page (and/or governance wrapping pallet) that filters all available proposals to decide on that you have any influence over, presents all available metadata for that proposal, presents each action you are capable of taking on that proposal as a single button, after you have addressed all of those actions available to you if any, you are shown anything you can propose yourself, which you can optionally choose to do, before sending all of your decisions as a batched extrinsic.

In my experience of coordinating this kind of process, it has generally been an issue and large source of unneccesary friction to direct people to do something like “make a proposal on page A, post a message in chat B and forum C, which you need to monitor, and then talk to everyone in this pre-established group of influencers X to progress your proposal to stage D, where after you wait some indeterminate period of time for maybe getting approved you then need to manually withdraw half your payment onchain and then make a report in B and C and to everyone who is in X if you want the rest of your payment.” saying this kind of thing to anyone just makes the only people willing to stay around the “institutional governance manipulators” I described earlier, and scammers who don’t spend any time building and are fine playing governance games for a payout and then leaving.

The process, in my eyes, should ideally be, based on how I understand Hoon’s design:

  • go to page A, make your proposal there, including a link containing all the requested context,
  • you will know if it has been approved within X days
  • you will begin getting paid in Y days
  • after that - go back to page A every Z days you’re working on the project with a link to an update and to claim your payment - you will be asked your opinion on other projects and then you can provide your update to your project.
  • If enough people/the council think it’s necessary to do so, your next payment will be your last, you will know this within X days, but you are still guaranteed that next payment, so you are expected to continue working within those X days.

In this scenario we abstract all governance decisions away to “projects opinions on other projects” in a queue of decisions they need to make every time they are claiming a bounty payout, guaranteeing a steady stream of governance participation by builders on other builders projects, all in the same place, and as part of a process they willingly want to participate in - think of it as the same kind of logic we see with validators and parachain teams being strongly encouraged to payout their nominators/contributors, even though they don’t technically have to, since it’s tied strongly to their own success and costs.

This works as well for company representatives on council, who I would assume are busy people with full time work other than engaging in blockchain gov - they would just need to visit the gov page once in a while, decide on their current queue of decisions, maybe poke one another for the occasional additional context - I won’t pretend this won’t happen, but it’s clear in this design the council isn’t making the micro-level funding decisions but rather operational ones and vetoing? Am I misunderstanding? It’s not clear from your description what their exact responsibilities are tbh.

tl;dr - Basically do gov fast and design for builders who value their time and aren’t playing politics and arguing on forums constantly.

longer tl;dr - you’re using a gov token for decisions, so we don’t need to worry about people being afraid to participate due to financial opp. cost. Just use referenda pallet and tracks for decisions, gate proposal making and payout claiming behind having votes for all proposals for gov token holders, and throw out the older UIs, make something card based with a queue of cards for each un-voted-on proposal, and submit all decisions and proposals at once as a batch. Make voting part of the proposing process and vice-versa, and make proposing something that is stupidly easy to do (cheap but not free), and stupidly easy to reject (because you aren’t killing someone by rejecting their proposals).

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Timeline

  • 2023 Q2: Astar Governance high-level model and features
  • 2023 Q3: Astar Governance “whitepaper” release, test, and validate the model
  • 2023 Q4: Code implementation and roll out to ShidenDAO
  • 2024 Q1 ~ Q2: Improve and roll out to Astar Network (remove sudo before or during this phase)

On this level of detail, timeline seems good (great really), but in terms of actually delivering in that time, I think some sub-quarter milestones should be defined so discussion converges.

For example, some boundaries/dates that I think should be explained:

  • how long will the discussion be open for inputs before drafting the 1st version of whitepaper?
  • when will the 1st draft of whitepaper be available for discussion/comments - there will definitely be a lot of discussion before actually agreeing on release (and enough time should be given to community to comment)
  • what does test and validate model mean in practical sense?
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This paper is well written!
If what is written really works, I am very proud of it.
I think it is a good explanation of the concept.

That said, I am very concerned about the actual executions.
How do we get this many participants and curators to governance and get them to be active?
Is it key to implement a little bit at a time, or is it important to provide plenty of incentives, or is it enough to get a million users in the ecosystem, or 200 companies?

I believe we need to go through a process of actually trying this, having problems arise, addressing them, and making improvements. I think it is important how quickly we can turn this PDCA cycle around. I think we have to spend a lot of resources on hypothesis testing and validation at Shiden. (I don’t see that as a problem either)

I think this is too optimistic.

  • 2023 Q3: Astar Governance “whitepaper” release, test, and validate the model
  • 2023 Q4: Code implementation and roll out to ShidenDAO

The process after releasing “whitepaper” should look like

  • Test and validate the model
  • Implementation and roll out to Shiden DAO
    (and we repeat this process many times)

Then, we can finally ship this to Astar.

In any case, we will have to agree on the expectations as to what circumstances would make the first implementation phase.

In terms of high-level models and functions, I can broadly agree. However, it must be mentioned that many points depend on future updates of dAppstaking and how we select Councils (incl. genesis councils) and may be changed or opposed accordingly.

As for Councils, I’m not sure that all Councils need to be “equal” in terms of influence on governance.
It is not good to have too much influence, but how do we measure the difference in performance and size between Council A and Council B in terms of actual growth and maintenance of the network?
It may be possible to reflect this in dAppStaking (we can imagine that powerful council may have more GovASTR through their products), but as these things show, it seems to me that we are leaving many kinds of issues to dAppStaking updates.

Also, I agree with what @andabak mentioned.
To make this happen, we would like to hear sub-quarter milestones with the timeline.

Thank you!

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Agreed with this point. The terminology is something we should be working on. Maybe we can drop the federal treasury and sub-treasury and call it the treasury and collectives to stay in line with the source terminology.

I like the points that you raised, but I’m not sure if I fully get what you mean by ASTR & GovASTR? ASTR holders can vote on who gets the voting right as described in my previous proposal.

Absolutely. But I think this and off-chain voting things (in fact, everything in this model), heavily rely on the fact that we have a good interface that works well for this. I’m hoping that your team can support.

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Thanks for the compliment :smiley: It means a lot coming from you. But I just want to clarify one thing since “decentralization” is a bit loaded nowadays. I want to establish a governance model that fits the vision of Astar Network and allows multiple teams and companies to work in the same ecosystem. So even if it’s a bit centralized, it’s not an issue.

Yes, this is an outcome that I was also afraid of, in that, what happens if the network wants the builders to have power and contribute to the governance, but they don’t want to. This is why the builders can give the govASTR to its stakers or delegates. I think I’m not answering your question. Still, my intention behind govASTR was that even if only teams and organizations with a lot of resources will ultimately take over the network, they still need to build something the average token holders want to support through dApps Staking. This means that Astar will ultimately have more dApps that people use regardless of who is in power (and to gain power, you need to put more resources into building a product). Honestly, the average user and degens wouldn’t care who has the power over the network. They want good projects.

Absolutely agree with this. We will have the referenda and delegation pallets as part of our model too, in this case, as you recommend.

I see. Reading this with your previous comment makes more sense. I don’t mind people not spending any time building, but remember that you need a stakable dApp with enough rewards to get the voting power in the first place. I imagine the model I wrote to be more like an “I build, so I vote. I don’t build, so I propose and deliver” model. Of course, nothing will be straightforward like this in practice.

If you’re talking about the sub-treasury process, then yes, it is similar to what I have imagined too.

That is correct. At least what I’m aiming for. The council’s role in the treasury context is to address “should I fund this activity or not?” and resolve divisive community votes. Only macro-level decisions.

Thanks for this suggestion. I totally agree with this, and I’ll have to partially rely on @Jaski to help me since it’s in the presentation layer, which will always change over time at a fast pace.

This too. I’m getting a lot of great input from you, and I think I got my biggest takeaways here.

Thank you!

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Hello @hoonkim,

Thanks for bringing the topic of governance to the Forum, it’s a topic that’s really very important to me and probably one of my favorite aspects of Polkadot.

However, as you explain, it’s important that it’s well researched, designed and tested before being launched on Astar. The way you propose to discuss, debate and build Astar’s governance together on the forum is for me the right way to go.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, I’d like to re-discuss the structuring of the discussion. As @Maarten pointed out, the topic is complex and difficult to understand on a platform such as the forum, it took me several readings to differentiate each part and so I think it’s important to re-scrutinize the topic for clarity and to allow community members to follow and participate in the sub-topics that interest and concern them.

From what I understand, I would divide the governance model we’re building into 4 main aspects:

  • General governance model (voters, voting token system, council, anonymous voting, etc.)
  • dApp Staking voting system (proposal, listing, de-listing, etc.)
  • Treasury (On-chain ideathon bounty, federal treasury, sub treasury, curators, etc.)
  • Modifications and updates to Astar network technical parameters (fees, collators, blocks, runtime, etc.).

For greater clarity, I suggest not grouping everything together in a single post on the forum but creating a new category on the forum: Governance and creating 5 posts for each of the previous topics:

  • Topic #0: Summary of Astar Governance, read-only topic with links to each subtopic.
  • Topic #1: Governance Model
  • Topic #2: Astar Treasury
  • Topic #3: Network settings and upgrades
  • Topic #4: dApp Staking voting system

In parallel, I propose to create a document on googledoc or notion with the whole governance model proposal and the sub-topics in order to have a single document to understand the whole topic without having to read the dozens (potentially hundreds) of questions and answers on the forum. This document will be available on the Governance summary topic.

I can create a 1st Draft of this document with the information available on the forum if you wish.

The subject of governance is so vast and important that it’s important for me to put in place a clear and solid framework so that we have the right foundations to work from and invite the community to participate in building the DAO.

Thanks!

G’, Astar & Polkadot Ambassador

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Thank you for your post and for bringing up some great points.

I generally agree with this point. In this case, I would like to use this post as the starting point to discuss the general model before the implementation.
However, I don’t think opening five separate posts simultaneously makes sense, as it would only dilute the participation and might put some points out of context. So, I propose that we have a dedicated category for improving the governance after the first iteration is implemented.

So my suggested timeline would be something like this:

  1. Create a high-level governance paper to describe the network’s vision (no technical details here, based on this thread).
  2. Identify the development requirements, such as a list of pallets, custom functions, and initial parameters.
  3. Implement them as a Substrate pallet and prefer runtime upgrade.
  4. Remove sudo.
  5. Open a discussion about each part of network governance.

In this proposed timeline, the most time-consuming part would be step 3 I think. The purpose is to first have the basic governance model that satisfies the team’s vision and allows more participants to voice their opinion and identify the issues that this model might have on the fly. I need to dive deeply into the new Substrate codebase for all things governance before we have a clear implementation plan. But I think this is the best approach if we want to start building and less talking.

What do you think?

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I now have a better understanding of the workflow you have in mind.

The first step is to discuss the general topic of governance in this post to create the paper you mentioned and during step 5 we can discuss the specific parts of the governance model.

To be sure, the timeline you describe is for the creation, development and implementation of the governance model on Shibuya, then Shiden to be tested before deploying it on the Astar network:

  • Steps 3 and 4 will take place first on Shibuya/Shiden,
  • Step 5, we’ll discuss and implement changes to the model if necessary on Shibuya/Shiden.
  • Step 6 will see the model deployed on Astar.

Am I correct?

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Shibuya wouldn’t be considered too much since it’s only meant for functional tests. Shiden is where (ideally) we test the viability of the model. And if the technical implementation seems to take a lot of time, I am also looking to work with @Jaski to create an off-chain “simulation” for our proposed governance model and operate through there.

And also, note that I don’t think deploying complete fool-proof governance on Astar is possible. Instead, this will be a gradual process where we introduce critical components of the governance to Astar one by one after assuring that the parameters (and the implementation) will not break the network given the worst-case scenario.

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Before I move on to other discussions, we are launching Townhall soon. It will allow all Polkadot & Kusama projects to experiment with governance. We’d soon be building Astar’s custom governance requirements into Townhall and keep the community updated on the progress and the final direction.

Now, talking about the treasury. @hoonkim and I recently had an interesting conversation around treasury diversification, revenue, bounties and grants.
While bounties is discusses above in this thread, a sustainable business model requires us to build good revenue channels for Astar’s treasury.

Currently all substrate based chains earn revenue from txn fees, slashing and a few other mechanics, which in totality are still not enough to build a sustainable treasury model.

Blockchains are often compared to countries, and while giving grants and bounties are like funding critical infrastructure and development, the government(blockchain) needs to build scalable and sustainable revenue models to keep the economy thriving.

Let’s look at,

a couple of things that a country does to grow the overall economy. When looked at from a blockchain's lens, most comparable things for a blockchain fall into grants/bounties/foundation led ecosystem development efforts.
  1. Infrastructure Development: Governments invest in the development of physical infrastructure such as roads, bridges, airports, ports, and telecommunications networks. This facilitates economic activity, attracts investment, and improves productivity.
  2. Education and Workforce Development: Investing in education and skill development programs helps create a qualified workforce. This enables industries to thrive, promotes innovation, and enhances a country’s competitiveness in the global market.
  3. Research and Development (R&D): Governments allocate resources to promote scientific research, technological advancements, and innovation. Supporting R&D activities can lead to the development of new industries, products, and services, driving economic growth.
  4. Industry and Sector-specific Incentives: Governments may offer tax incentives, subsidies, or grants to attract investment in specific industries or sectors. These incentives can encourage companies to invest, expand operations, and contribute to the country’s economic growth.
  5. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Promotion: Governments actively promote and facilitate foreign investment in their countries. They may offer incentives, establish special economic zones, or streamline regulatory processes to attract FDI, which can stimulate economic growth and create employment opportunities.
  6. Trade and Export Promotion: Governments implement policies to boost exports and reduce trade barriers. They may negotiate trade agreements, provide export financing, or support market access initiatives to increase revenue through international trade.
  7. Entrepreneurship and Small Business Support: Governments often provide assistance and incentives to foster entrepreneurship and support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This helps create jobs, encourages innovation, and diversifies the economy.
  8. Tourism Development: Governments invest in promoting tourism through marketing campaigns, infrastructure development, and favorable policies. Tourism can contribute significantly to a country’s revenue by attracting foreign visitors and generating foreign exchange earnings.
  9. Sustainable Development Initiatives: Countries focus on sustainable development practices, including investments in renewable energy, environmental conservation, and green technologies. These investments promote long-term economic growth while addressing environmental challenges.
  10. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs): Governments collaborate with the private sector to undertake large-scale projects. PPPs leverage private sector expertise and capital while sharing risks and rewards, enabling the implementation of critical infrastructure projects and stimulating economic growth.

Used Chatgpt’s help for the list above.

Now let's look at some interesting examples of how countries 'Make' money.
  1. Startup and Innovation Investment:
  • Singapore: The government of Singapore established various initiatives, including the National Research Foundation and the government-backed venture capital firm, to attract startups and investments in innovation sectors such as fintech, biotech, and artificial intelligence. These efforts have transformed Singapore into a thriving startup hub.
  1. Sovereign Wealth Funds:
  • United Arab Emirates (UAE): The UAE established the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and the Mubadala Investment Company. These sovereign wealth funds invest in diverse sectors globally, including technology, real estate, and energy. The funds generate significant returns, contributing to the country’s revenue.
  1. Tourism and Entertainment:
  • United Arab Emirates (UAE): The UAE, particularly Dubai, has invested heavily in tourism and entertainment. Developments like the Burj Khalifa, Palm Jumeirah, and world-class shopping malls attract tourists, generate revenue from hotel stays, shopping, and entertainment activities.
  1. Public Sector Commercialization:
  • Finland: Finland transformed some public entities into profitable businesses. For example, the Finnish postal service, Posti Group, expanded into logistics, e-commerce, and digital services, becoming a commercially successful enterprise that contributes to the country’s revenue.
  1. Natural Resource Monetization:
  • Norway: Norway effectively monetizes its natural resources, particularly oil and gas, through state ownership and investment in the petroleum sector. The government established the Government Pension Fund Global, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, funded by oil revenues.
  1. Export-oriented Manufacturing:
  • China: China has developed export-oriented manufacturing industries, becoming a global manufacturing hub. The country’s investment in infrastructure, technology parks, and favorable policies have attracted foreign companies, boosting manufacturing and generating export revenues.
  1. Financial Services and Offshore Centers:
  • Switzerland: Switzerland has positioned itself as a global financial services hub and attracts foreign capital through banking, wealth management, and financial institutions. Additionally, Switzerland is known for its offshore centers, such as Zug, which provide a favorable business environment for companies and generate revenue.
  1. Agriculture and Agro-processing:
  • Netherlands: The Netherlands is a leading exporter of agricultural products, employing innovative agricultural techniques and investing in agro-processing industries. The country’s horticulture sector, including greenhouse farming and flower exports, contributes significantly to its revenue.

Thinking from Astar’s pov, we need to build businesses with and on the treasury that help in growth of the ecosystem.
A couple of ideas for the same:

  1. Investing as a venture capital firm - Astar’s treasury could LP into a fund investing into various applications building in the Astar ecosystem or across web3. The investment thesis and mandate can be developed with the community and the investments, other details can be shared with the community in a timely and legally compliant manner.
    The returns from the fund would be converted back to ASTR tokens and sent back to the treasury.
  2. Build products that generate revenue - Astar can fund the development of projects internally(led by foundation) or outsource projects to development agencies(while keeping ownership of the product), where the foundation clearly sees a revenue opportunity and ecosystem growth as a collective.
  3. Blockchain as a service: Develop custom solutions on service agreements with corporate clients and bring that revenue to the treasury.
  4. Investment into fixed/stable yields - Treasury bonds are the safest investment form and a portion of the treasury could be used to invest in these bonds and generate a sustainable yield.
  5. Diversified investments into other asset classes and partner token swaps - This is something that we have already seen some other projects in web3 successfully do.

Some of these are not feasible and I am sure there are many more ideas that can be thought of. The intention is to start thinking in direction of making the most use of the available treasury at hand, rather than letting it sit in a wallet, waiting to be deployed some day as a grant/bounty.

Thanks,
Jaski

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Thanks for your amazing response, and I look forward to seeing Townhall in action. It’s a platform we need for discussions within the ecosystem to be more visible.

Regarding your response, I like your approach of looking at the blockchain treasury as a government reserve to create a sustainable business model. Although I don’t think we need to develop a perfect business model from the start, I think it puts the entire governance process into a different perspective that I was lacking.

Before I respond to the individual ideas you presented, I would like to define what I want Astar Network to consider a valuable asset.
In a traditional DAO system, the value revolves around the treasury, and the governance participants are more interested in maximizing this component. I think the culture of Polkadot governance is particularly like this (which, I think, was unintentional). Because the system can accumulate a large treasury that is encouraged to be spent, most of the interest from the community is centered around getting their hands on the treasury.

But in Astar, I want us to see that the valuable assets aren’t just limited to the treasury. Instead, Astar will have the following types of assets:

  • Treasury worth: The number of spendable tokens in the treasury and how it accumulates.
  • Ecosystem net worth: The collective worth of all the active ecosystem projects on Astar.
  • Technical worth: The value of the technology and protocol that other businesses can use.

So if we go back to the point about having a sustainable business model for the network, it should be about using one asset to increase the other. For example, using the treasury to increase the ecosystem’s net worth. Or using the protocol’s technical value to increase the treasury’s income. So for me, the system should be modeled so that whatever the vote decides, it should always go back to either of the three. This is what I would consider to be sustainable. And I think this point goes very nicely with what you mentioned about generating value through products.

I am very open to seeing a so-called VC-DAO component in Astar Governance. However, I am unsure how the legality would work, and it would be up to the Astar Foundation to facilitate this. Perhaps this is something we can learn from Polimec if they succeed.

I feel like this should be handled carefully because the question would go back to “how to fund the development,” and the obvious answer is the treasury. I am all for having a sector budget-based treasury funding system similar to your real-life example. And the Foundation, alongside the council, should manage this. But the maintainer (curator) also developing and being the beneficiary of the budget sounds like a sticky situation.

This is the ideal situation we want to be. I hope the deal with various Japanese corporations can lead to this situation, but my expectations aren’t high.

I’m treating these to be in the same category since bonds are also a form of assets. In short, this can be seen as ‘diversifying treasury assets,’ and this is something I would definitely like to see us doing too. All good DAOs should take this approach.

I think what we are discussing here is very high level. It’s worth talking about it, but I feel we should also talk about some low-level treasury business models regarding actionable systems.

I have an idea that I would like to hear your thoughts about. I call it the treasury grants loan system. So assuming that all treasury proposals are done through a verified account (so vanity accounts wouldn’t be accepted) if the account wants to request a second treasury proposal, they must pay a small percentage back to the treasury to be able to open a new one. The idea is to encourage funding for proposals that generate value in return.

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Hello everyone!

I am happy to announce that I finished drafting the Astar governance whitepaper last week. It is currently under review with my governance partners and undergoing an editing process so that it is presentable to the general public.

Please stay tuned!

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Hello @hoonkim ,

Is this post being discussed somewhere? I’m really interested in this topic.

I’m building a product about process and voting. I think I could contribute to this topic.

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Hi @hoonkim, thank you for this post!
I think all the ideas and concepts discussed here have every chance to be a big step towards decentralisation.
Since it’s been quite some time since last comments here, I was wondering: was the Astar governance whitepaper already presented to public? if so, where can it be found?
Thank you!

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The whitepaper is finished, and the Foundation is currently planning on the right timing and method for making it public.

@godwin For governance discussions, we can use this thread. I’m happy to elaborate in any way. There are no other ongoing discussions outside of the Astar governance task force that we are creating jointly with the Polkassembly team for their new platform, TownHall.

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I am looking forward to checking the finished whitepaper. Let’s goooo

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Although there isn’t any official publication from the Foundation yet, I can share the current draft (practically finished; just needs some validation and modeling) with everyone. I don’t see why this should be kept a secret.

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This is correct because the model made in the draft still has a lot of open questions from our dev team that still aren’t answered. The implementation of the runtime that needs to be done by the foundation still has open questions that aren’t answered in this whitepaper or you to the team.

If you want, I can bring those questions to the forum.

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Yes. Keeping the discussion (or perhaps opening a separate thread) in the forums would be much better for me.

The contents of the whitepaper are a longer version of this post. So, there is no major change in direction or implications. If the direction is something that everyone agrees on, then the detailed implementation happens in the following phase:

  1. Off-chain mock voting
  2. Smart contract prototype
  3. Pallet runtime version
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Technical comments:

  • The whitepaper is more about ideas than concrete items of what needs to be done.
  • For instance, what councils are needed, how much govASTR issued, and how to break down sudo responsibility.
  • It needs modeling on details.

As above, it’s not ready for implementation unless a more concrete solution is provided.

The model is novel and risky for us.

  • No data and modeling to support the conclusion.
  • A lot of custom implementation is needed to make the idea happen.
  • Dependent on and coupled with dApp staking implementation. If there are bugs in dApp staking, the governance could be hijacked.

How those this off-chain mock voting works? I have check Townhall as proposed but this wasn’t working. Should be use a beta for Astar mainnet? Why not use snapshots when account unification is done?

Can you explain more about the smart contract prototype? Will this be battletested on Astar or is everything going to Shiden first?

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