1. Preface
Most people’s understanding of the blockchain is limited to the technical aspects. If you talk to someone about any crypto project, they will ask you “What is the tps?” “Is it a smart contract platform?” or “Is there any technical innovation compare to the mainstream blockchain projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum?” However, most people would not mention the non-technical aspects， such as the design of a blockchain’s token economy and governance model.
It is human nature to look for quick success. Thus new projects always rely on technical innovations to attract eyeballs in order to survive. The determining factors for projects’ future development, such as whether the token design is reasonable and whether the governance model is stable and efficient, seems still quite far away from us after all.
However, what we cannot ignore is that blockchain projects, like organic living organisms, need to constantly innovate in the operation and maintenance process to adapt to the new environment and solve new problems.
2. YOYOW’s Governance
To understand the committee, we must first understand YOYOW’s governance model.
Issues to be addressed in blockchain governance include: how groups with different interests are balanced; governance structures and rules of procedures; conflicting interests or opinions on how to make compromises and how to reach group decisions that have general constraints on members, etc. Governance consensus involves peoples’ subjective value judgment and processes subjective multi-value consensus. Participants in governance consensus converge to one single opinion otherwise the governance consensus would fail. A successful blockchain system must have a mechanism for achieving consensus and self-innovation within a mature community.
Bitcoin developers share their improvement proposals (BIPs) through an E-mail list while the Ethereum Foundation collects proposals (BIPs) on GitHub. This kind of governance is somewhat similar to the US Government, with many benefits. Similar to how new bills are submitted by the senate, the developers submit applications for iteration. Similar to judiciary, miners decide whether to adopt these new laws in practice. Similar to the administration department, the nodes of the network can reject versions that are different from the version in which the miner is running. Similar to citizens, users can resist.
Graphene-based projects such as BTS, EOS and YOYOW have another set of governance structure and model. The project improvement plans are proposed and decided by a group of nodes that are trusted and delegated by the community. That means there is a group of people specifically responsible for the blockchain projects’ self-innovation and development matters. However, there are some slight differences when it comes to execution. This special group of people in YOYOW and BTS are called Committee Members; while in EOS they are called Block Producers. Besides the different names, there are differences in their roles as well. The Block Producers in EOS not only have decision-making power but also execution rights. Ledger-keeping (block producing) gets paid, and the Block Producers get both the power and the benefits. This often gets criticized for having the potential risk of cooperated malicious behavior, such as collusion to increase their income. Whereas in YOYOW and BTS, the committee only has the decision making power but not getting paid, which is obviously more reasonable. This way, the committee (decision maker), the witnesses (executer) and the token holders (supervisor) can work together on the blockchain governance.
3. The Committee
As mentioned above, the YOYOW committee is elected by the token holders through voting. The committee has many responsibilities such as adjusting the parameters of the YOYOW system, including transaction fee rates and block rewards, etc. At the same time, the committee also has the decision-making power.
The number of YOYOW committee members is set to five, and each term is 30 days. These are hard coded and cannot be changed. The initial committee members are appointed by the system, and later on the committee will be elected by the token holders through voting. It is important to note that the committee members are unpaid!
4. Run! Committee! Run!
How to become a member of the committee? Well, the first thing you need to do is to stake a certain amount of YOYO to become a committee candidate, because only the committee candidates are eligible to be elected to become formal committee members! Currently, the minimum staking amount is 1000 YOYO.
Once staking is successful, you can participate in the committee election. If you wish to increase your chance of being elected, then you can try to increase your influence as well as the amount of trust the community has in you by actively participate in community discussions, listen to different opinions, come up with proposals after thinking and consideration, and share your ideas and thoughts with the community. Each account/token holder can only vote for one candidate but can change his vote anytime.
If you are lucky enough to become a committee member, you will be able to initiate a proposal. The proposal has a set format, including the following items: proposal content, voting deadline, passing threshold, and proposal effective time.
The final result is voted by all members of the committee. There are three statuses for committee’s voting: Yes, Neutral and No. The proposal initiator’s vote is set to Yes by default. Each committee member has one vote, and can be changed anytime. If the voting result reaches the threshold, then the proposal is passed.
Things to be pointed out:
The passing threshold is preset based on the type of proposal and is not customizable. There is no veto threshold for now, only passing threshold.
If a proposal contains multiple items, then all must pass or none will, and the highest passing threshold of the items will be used.
The proposal’s effective time cannot be later than the end date of the initiated committee member’s term. The effective time can be set to a past time, and in that case it would immediately take effect after passing.
If the effective time has passed when the number of Yes reaches the passing threshold, then the proposal will take effect immediately, otherwise the proposal will take effect according to the planned schedule.
Before the voting deadline and before the effective time, voters can change their vote. After the voting deadline, votes cannot be changed.
The voting for a committee proposal must finish before the end of the initiated member’s term otherwise the proposal will be obsolete when the term ends. Passed proposals will take effect according to schedule and will not be affected by the term’s end date.
Proposals taking effect does not mean the changed system parameters will take effect right away, because different system parameters have different preset conditions/methods.
If for some reason you don’t want to be a committee member anymore, then you can quit anytime without worrying about your staked tokens. The staked tokens can be refunded, usually with a one day delay.
5. Conclusion
Overall, the YOYOW committee is a community-governed agency that can function by itself. Its members are fairly trusted by the community. The committee does a lot of constructive work, such as optimizing parameters and changing witness’s wages. YOYOW’s governance system makes self-innovation and evolution more flexible comparing to Bitcoin or Ethereum, and more fair in comparison to the governance model of EOS which does not separate power and interest. In the future, we believe YOYOW will be more successful under the lead of its committee.
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YOYOW Official Website: https://yoyow.org/en.html