Community Voting — Defining the Future of Public Goods

“The only way to practice democracy is to practice democracy.” — Hu Shih.

Activists! We appreciate the zeal but we aren’t distributing ballots here. So, calm the heck down. Okay, that’s settled then.

Let’s talk ‘Voting’. More specifically, voting across the Web3 space. If your mind is still wondering what is Web3, …Hi, caveman(Museum to the right)

Over the past few years, the term voting has been re-enumerated and invigorated. Reason being? You guessed it. Rise of the Planet of a̶p̶e̶s ̶DAOs.

I think it’s not an exaggeration at this point to say that DAOs, otherwise known as Decentralised Autonomous Organisations are the Messiah of modern-day voting. While 65% of democratically run nations have lost the citizen’s confidence in the election system, innovation has not ceased to exist in the decentralized space. The purpose of a DAO is basically to form an organization that is run by the community and for the community.

On paper, the functioning is super simple to understand. Decentralized in nature, there’s no central authority/board to implement features or changes. If an individual feels that so and so feature should be added to the product, a proposal needs to be submitted by that very individual. Once submitted, this proposal will be voted on by the rest of the community. (Either for/against)

Note: For casting a vote on any proposal, the voter has to stake some amount of tokens(in most cases the token of the protocol itself). This is important as it upholds the authenticity of the entire mechanism as opposed to a like/dislike system on any social media. If the proposal passes with a majority, then the feature gets implemented. So, what’s in there for the voters? Well, if you had voted for the proposal and it passed with a majority, volla! You receive extra tokens as incentives. See? Run by the community, for the community. Genius!

You can already tell how much I am vowed by DAOs. In fact, all of the team here at Chainwhiz, share the same amount of love for DAOs. Specifically, the fact that it is the purest form of a decentralized democracy to exist in this era simply blows our minds.

However, voting on proposals is just one demonstration of the power a community possesses. Web3 has opened up a plethora of opportunities for each and every member of the community to contribute meaningfully and be recognized through incentives. Our platform is adding yet another dimension to this.

Introducing Community Voting

Imagine this. You’re planning on a vacation to Paris. It’s going to be your first time there and you’re really pumped. Flight tickets are booked and it’s now time to select the hotels for your stay. You open up your favorite hotel booking site, click through some pictures and ultimately land on a beautiful property by the seaside. Awesome! But is that enough for you to make a decision?

Absolutely, not. It’s now time for you to check the reviews and the ratings. Is it a 4-star rated property or a 1-star rated? And, this is the fundamental thing that ends up guiding your decision ultimately. Why? Because we as humans are conditioned to base our decision on other people’s experiences.

Today, it is extremely easy to make a decision about anything online, thanks to the existing reviews. Ratings make your curation process much faster and easier. We, at Chainwhiz, are bringing the same kind of ease for bounty-posters and projects.

Projects need to spend hours if not days to get to the best solutions to their bounties. This is because there may be 50 interested developers solving a bounty and submitting 50 different solutions to it. Now, the project posting the bounty needs to inspect all the 50 solutions in order to figure out the best solution. This is a time-consuming process and is not at all optimized for projects with limited teams and resources.

We at Chainwhiz are helping projects get to the best solutions to their bounties in minutes by introducing a system where community members on the platform can vote on solutions submitted to a bounty. This way, the project posting the bounty now has a list of 50 solutions with voting scores for each of them, very similar to the rating for a hotel property on the booking site. Now, the project’s job is 10x faster and easier. It can now easily identify the best ones of the lot using the scores as a reference. From hours to just minutes of work.

But hey, how do we know that the voting system is authentic?

Good question. In order to vote on a solution, you are required to stake a certain amount of tokens and then cast a vote. If the solution on which you’re voting isn’t the highest voted one at the very end of the voting phase, you lose a percentage of your staked tokens. This is called the slashing of tokens. This acts as a safeguard to the voting system as it minimizes the scope of bad actors or spammers. The ones who’re interested to contribute seriously and helping the project, are the only ones who participate in the voting phase.

Awesome! But why as a community member would I feel motivated to vote?

Simple. Every time the solution on which you’re voting ends up being the highest voted solution at the end of the voting phase, you earn extra tokens on top of your staked amount. As an example, if you had staked 5 MATIC tokens and voted on a solution, and that solution ends up being the highest voted one, you receive back 5 MATIC tokens plus 2 extra MATIC tokens as an incentive. This drives meaningful contributions all across the platform and opens up opportunities for good actors.

Moreover, at Chainwhiz you can build an on-chain reputation for yourself with our voter weightage feature. This is a leaderboard kinda thing, wherewith each contribution on our platform as a voter, your weightage of votes increases. What this means is that the value of your vote increases with more and more experience. This is directly related to the incentives you receive for every highest-voted solution. For example — A voter with a lower voter weightage will receive lower incentives for the highest voted solution compared to someone with a higher voter weightage.

With our goal in mind of becoming a fully decentralized solution, the voter weightage calculation needs to follow an algorithmic implementation. A self-adjusting algorithm, that adapts to the recent contributions of a voter. This is in design presently, and progress is to be made along the way.

Community Voting and the Future

Voting on solutions is just one of many use-cases of community voting. We have some exciting future plans to increase the number of use-cases of our voting system. Removal of spammers automatically with the power of community, solving a conflict between clients and builders, platform improvement proposals, etc. are some of the highlights.

Now, we would like you, the community to give us your thoughts about this new way of voting. What future potential does this have? If you have any suggestions as to how we can build on this, feel free to share in the comments section.

In case you want to see the voting system implemented in real-time, check us out at app.chainwhiz.app. You can also watch our product walkthrough to get a better understanding visually. Click here to Watch!

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