In our role as validator we are fortunate to work with a number of capable blockchains. Our focus today is on NEAR.
Described as “the builder’s fastest path to market”, NEAR is an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications. It operates at consumer speed, harnesses the Internet-of-Value, has secure financial components and enables the creation of sustainable apps that are 100% owned and operated by users. Thus this community-driven project aims to democratize the development of the emerging Open Web architecture via blockchain technology. On the 13 October 2020 it completed the transition to Phase 2 of its mainnet, which has seen the network become fully decentralized and permissionless.
NEAR is rightly working hard to create the appropriate governance for the project. LunaNova participated in the first virtual conference focused on NEAR governance on the 23rd October 2020. It’s purpose was to learn lessons from the early governance experience of debating and deciding to make the transition to Phase2. Whilst not a formal record of the conference this post provides LunaNova’s perspective on this important event.
It was good to see that the validators who came together on the 23rd were genuinely interested in improving future decision making:
There was recognition of the positives of seeing liquid democracy in action: the community participated, challenged each other, gathered information, worked to try to ensure that questions were addressed and actions taken; based on votes weighted by delegated stake the community made a decision.
The group had concerns about variable decision criteria in the absence of prior agreement about the decision criteria and the lack of a reliable, verifiable, single source of data about the status of factors influencing the decision the combined effect of which was that at times we seemed to be trying to hit a moving target!
The group were very much in agreement that there should not be governance for the sake of it, and that there was not a large enough community to require strong governance at this point but that there would be a need for an effective governance process/system in the future.
This prompted the question of what such governance could be. The general conclusion was that a large general-purpose governance model would be inappropriate but that the minimum viable governance should be established which:
- collects community/stakeholder feedback
- makes the best decisions
- decides how to implement change resulting from such decisions
This is a challenge given that we may be building for users we do not yet know!
It was acknowledged that governance requires a lot of time and effort and to improve decision-making efficiency and pace it could be better to delegate this to a group of capable individuals who may need to be rewarded for the time they would need to invest. There was a recognition that not all stakeholders could be practically involved and that it may be better to delegate aspects of this to a small, well motivated and well qualified group. A group whose purpose would be to sift through the information and make recommendations to the community, which would be free to accept or reject such recommendations. Such a group could be an electable council which begs the question of how do we get an electable council? In being aware of plutocracy preferences at this early stage there is acknowledgment that holders of large amounts of tokens, who may be exchanges or even validators, should not be able to have undue influence.
In considering these issues the group will be considering some of the emergent ways of organizing stakeholder representation, such as DHARMA and FLUX, whereby token holders for example can effectively nominate a spokesperson to represent their views. Such a spokesperson would not necessarily be a validator!
The group will continue to work on addressing these challenges and may well organize some structured experiments during Phase 2 to better inform what is done. This will require a cautious approach which recognizes that large portions of the community will not really be interested in the minutiae but in the effectiveness of the protocol, as translated into token price and profitability. It requires treading a fine line in only putting forward the issues that really require attention.
A slow cautious approach will be considered which initially addresses subjects such as :
- Improving clarity about when votes should be initiated
- Building decision making criteria
- Working on how validators communicate with the community
There will now be a period in which structured feedback will be collected from the meeting attendants.
LunaNova will continue to keep you informed of developments in NEAR’s governance. If you have any questions about this or any aspect of our NEAR validator services, please contact us via our website.
A pdf detailing our NEAR validator service is available here.
