In Defence of Polkadot’s Governance Mechanism

6 criticisms and their rebuttals

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

I came across a few tweets that criticized Polkadot’s on-chain governance mechanism. Normally, I would have scrolled past it, but these caught my attention because I’m a fan of Polkadot’s ecosystem design, and in particular, it’s blend of on-chain governance and forkless upgrades. I believe this combination is a huge leap forward for decentralization because of the speed it adds to the evolution of the network.

In Polkadot’s relatively short existence, on-chain governance and forkless upgrades have achieved the following:

• Redenominated the DOT via referenda
• Upgraded the runtime on x occasions without any forks
• Reduced the amount of DOTs a nominator needs to get staking rewards from 200 to 1
• Funded the development of the network using the on-chain treasury — wherein community members and teams make proposals, defend their proposals against the council, and get funded
• Rewarded contributions to the ecosystem via the on-chain tipping process — wherein community members recommend themselves or others who have helped the ecosystem (either through writing blogs, hosting events, etc.) for tips.