Polkadot Presented the New Governance System

Polkadot has presented their vision of a new governance system. It’s called Gov2.

Polkadot is a protocol that connects various blockchains and exchanges data between each other. Polkadot also has its own token — DOT, which is used in staking and governance.

A large post appeared on the official Polkadot blog on July 20. In it, Dr. Gavin Wood, Polkadot co-founder, talked about how the project team sees the new governance system on Polkadot. We are presenting you with a brief overview of this blog post.

In the early years, the Polkadot governance system was a kind of parliamentary democracy. Dr. Gavin Wood writes and that this system is “functioning reasonably”, but “it has its drawbacks”.

“Polkadot’s first decentralised governance system was pretty interesting at the time: a tri-cameral (three-chamber) structure with a technocratic committee managing upgrade timelines, an approval-voted, elected executive “government” to manage parameters, admin and spending proposals as well as a general voting system for everything else which rewarded long-term stakeholders with increased influence.”

The disadvantages of the first governance system was that “the elected executive (known as the Council) is centralized and generally not anonymous.” The centralization of this body is a problem, because it gives several users a greater power compared to the rest. In addition, Council members are not anonymous, which can lead to pressure on them to promote certain solutions.

“In a world where authorities across society (both benign and malevolent), decentralisation is increasingly needed for both the safety and security of all participants.”

The old governance system will be replaced by a new one. And it’s name is Gov2. The goal of the new system, which is logical, is to correct the disadvantages of the old one. In addition, the new system will retain the fundamental principle of the first governance system: “50% of the total stake in the system should, if they have sufficient strength of conviction in their opinion, be able ultimately to command the system’s future.” Also, one more principle of Polkadot named Conviction Voting will remain unchanged: “giving greater weight to those who are willing to lock their tokens into the system for longer.”

“Where it differs most is how it manages the practical means of day-to-day decision-making, making the repercussions of referenda better scoped and agile in order to dramatically increase the number of collective decisions the system is able to take.”

Gov2 will bring such innovations as:

• Absence of such additional management bodies as the Council and Technical Committee.
• Expanding the capabilities of the referendum mechanism. “The main difference in Gov2 is that there can be lots of them [referenda] — perhaps even thousands — all happening simultaneously.”
• Introduction of Origin and Tracks — auxiliary systems for referenda.
• A new system of criteria that each referendum must match in order to move to the Deciding state.
• Decision approval system. “Once a referendum enters the state of deciding, then it is eligible to be approved. This eligibility lasts only a finite time (28 days on Polkadot), at which point if it is not approved then it is rejected by default.”
• Saving and improving the Vote Delegation function.
• Implementation of The Polkadot Fellowship — “self-governing expert body with a primary goal of representing the humans who embody and contain the technical knowledge base of the Polkadot network and protocol.”
• Rank system and The Whitelist

In a huge post about Gov2, there was also very interesting information that Gov2 is planning to launch on the Kusama network soon.

“Gov2 is set to launch on Kusama imminently, following final professional audit of its code. Once tested on Kusama, a proposal will be made for the Polkadot network to vote on”.

Polkadot has started an extremely interesting period — a time of changes. Over the coming months, new features will appear in the Polkadot governance system that can make the protocol more stable and secure. We continue to observe with interest.