Spotlight Series: adChain Governance

Written by Hunter Gebron

The ability to make changes is essential. Sometimes we make a change as an improvement to our lives and other times it is to yield to an outside force (like slowing down when a police officer pulls you over for speeding). In our personal lives making a change means making a decision and then taking some action.

In large centralized organizations made up of many people, there needs to be a method or protocol in place before implementing something that will result in a systemic change to the organization as a whole. Sometimes the CEO will make the decision or perhaps its a board of directors. If an organization is more democratically oriented, it could hold a vote amongst all of its members to decide what to do.

But in the absence of any centralized, hierarchical leadership to guide the decision-making process, how can a decentralized system like adChain provide a way for its participants to come to an agreement on what changes to make to the system?

It would need to have a mechanism in place that provides the participants with a way to come to consensus on whether or not the change should be made, and the means by which they can implement it.

This is why we built the adChain Governance Module.

The adChain Governance Module provides a mechanism within our Dapp where all participants can propose changes to the adChain system and can vote on whether to implement those proposed changes or not.

What changes can be made to the adChain Registry?

There are a number of parameters that can be changed in the adChain Registry by using the Governance Module. The full list can be seen here.

But taking one, applyStageLength, as an example, let’s say that the application stage length (the period of time an application is eligible to be challenged) is currently set in the adChain Registry for a duration of 2 weeks. However, if you feel that 2 weeks is much too long and would, therefore, like to see the length reduced to 24 hours. You can head over to the Governance Module and create a proposal to change the application stage length to 24 hours.

If you are not alone in your thinking, then others will agree with you and join in to vote your proposal into effect. If your proposal receives a majority of votes, then it will be implemented, and the new application stage length will be set to a duration of 24 hours. This is decentralized governance in action!

What are the means used to vote?

The Governance Module relies on the same PLCR token-weighted voting system that the adChain Registry uses for curation. So, 1 vote = 1 adToken. New proposals to change the Registry’s parameters are proposed by using adToken. If the community considers a proposal to be bad, then they can issue a challenge, at which point a voting period will kick off where the community can vote to either support or oppose the proposed change.

Conclusion

Building a robust governance mechanism is a key step towards fostering a truly open and decentralized community. The adChain Governance Module ensures that the community has full control over the Registry’s parameters and can autonomously operate the Registry independent of any other entity. This is important because it removes the traditionally centralized decision making processes most organizations rely on.

To see a full list of the parameters which can be changed in the adChain Registry and a more detailed breakdown of the Governance Module, please click here.