Polkadot overhauls governance, eliminates privileged voting groups.
Polkadot, a network of interconnected public blockchains, has simplified its governance model to allow for simultaneous voting on multiple issues, with the community having direct control over everything.
Polkadot OpenGov was introduced on Thursday and aims to eliminate the so-called “first class citizens” like the Polkadot Council and the Technical Committee, which were both elected entities with the power to propose referenda and approve spending proposals. Polkadot and its “canary” network Kusama have learned from previous systems such as Ethereum, and are living up to their next-generation blockchain reputation by addressing the problem of getting decentralized governance to scale, which other organizations like MakerDAO have also been struggling with for some time.
The Polkadot Council and Technical Committee will be replaced by a new elected body called the Polkadot Fellowship, which will have no power over the network and cannot change parameters or move assets. The Fellowship currently has 45 members and is expected to keep growing as core developers submit their candidacy.
To eliminate bottlenecks in the current system, multiple voting proposal tracks can take place simultaneously, according to Joe Petrowski, System Parachains Team Lead at Web3 Foundation.
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“The previous governance system could only take one referendum at a time with the default that each one lasted for 28 days, so you could only get 12 or 13 of these through a year,” Petrowski said in an interview with blockchain. “That pace makes sense for sensitive things like system upgrades, but not for when somebody wants to make a treasury proposal or start a new option for a parachain.”
OpenGov was tested on Kusama for six months before being implemented on Polkadot.
CORRECTION (June 15, 13:37 UTC): Corrects spelling of Petrowski in penultimate two paragraphs.
Edited by Sheldon Reback.
