Community Governance

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Historical Recap

On November 30th 2017 Zen Protocol Ltd sold licenses which granted access to proprietary software. On June 30th, 2018, with release of the genesis block, the software was re-licensed and released under the Authorized Protocol — an open source license that also stipulates governance mechanisms for the ZP community. Our reasoning is as follows:

• Control over the protocol should lie with the community and its token holders — while not detracting the obligation to contribute human and financial capital resources for the betterment of Zen Protocol and its ecosystem.
• The community must have an effective and agreed upon means to coordinate efforts and resolve disputes.

Zen Protocol — Community Governance

The Zen Protocol software implements a hard stop. This keeps all nodes up to date, and provides for an orderly transition between upgrades.

It is when these planned semi-annual upgrades occur that contributors may propose release candidates for the community to vote on. Community members may — on a coin-weighted basis — vote which release candidate will be adopted as the next upgrade to the protocol.

Upgrade Timeline

Upgrade Timeline

Every 65,000 blocks, a voting interval occurs.

• Proposal Submission:
  Proposed consensus changes must be disclosed, with a working release candidate, 10,000 blocks prior to the Tally Block (T— 10,000).
• Snapshot Block:
  The Snapshot Block occurs 1,000 blocks prior to the Tally block (T— 1,000). The more ZP you hold at the snapshot, the greater the weight of your vote.
• Tally Block:
  The Tally Block T denotes the end of the voting interval, after which results are tallied.
• Upgrade Period:
  Subsequent to the end of the voting period, the community has a period of 10,000 blocks to upgrade to the release candidate which won the vote, before their current version expires.

The above timeline provides the community with approximately one month to discuss and review a proposal prior to voting on it, three days to participate in the vote, and another month to upgrade to a new version once it has been decided to do so.

How to participate in the upcoming vote:

Voting UI in the desktop wallet

• The upcoming community vote will be between blocks 129,000–130,000.
• Your vote will be weighted in proportion to the amount of ZP you have at the snapshot block (129,000 in this interval).
• We have updated our wallet software to provide a better user interface for voting. You may participate in the vote using either our web or desktop wallets.
• After voting starts you will have until block 130,000 to vote. You can see the voting at zp.io/governance.

Voting results — zp.io/governance

We strongly recommend you try out the functionality on the Testnet Wallets and Block Explorer prior to participating in the Mainnet vote.

Summary

Our aspiration is to build a platform today which can serve as the backbone of the the financial system in the future. In order to do this, it is important we mitigate central points of failure when we are still in an early enough stage to be able to do so.

We have already discussed Multi Hash Mining (Cook, 17), a mechanism which removes miners as a point of failure.

Community Voting represents another way to remove a central point of failure. In the event the initial team members are hit by a bus, or the corporate entity fails, the protocol will continue to function unscathed.

Please join us on our Telegram group for more information.

Thank You,

Adam