Introducing the Harmony Network Governance App

Published in

Harmony

6 min readMar 5, 2021

The Harmony team is releasing the first governance app for the Harmony network. As with other projects and networks, the decisions should be made by the community, or in this case, the validators, on what upgrades, incentives or changes we should make for the Harmony network so that it becomes even more attractive to community validators and participants.

We have ported the widely known snapshot.page, which is an off-chain governance app for the Ethereum ecosystem. It supports simple governance in the form of creating and voting on proposals.

This is the first step towards a fully decentralized network and governance. The intention of this early release is to encourage the participation of all the validators in the network and empower validators to take the ownership of the network upgrade, parameter adjustment, and the release process. It is also a learning process for the community and the team on the final decentralization destination. We are still working on the full on-chain governance application and model.

Network Governance

As a first step, we are releasing the network governance app, which enables the active validators to create proposals and vote on them, for the benefit of the network. As the network and core protocol are quite complicated and require deep knowledge of EPoS and some technical/blockchain background, we are only letting the validators to create and vote on the proposals.

The network governance model includes proposal, voting, and implementation processes.

A proposal has to be submitted by an elected validator. The proposal shall include a summary in the content and a link to a post in the “Governance” section of the forum https://talk.harmony.one so that the community can discuss and debate in the forum post.

A proposal will be moved forward when the majority is reached. Otherwise, it is rejected. The majority of the quorum is defined as more than 66% of all the staked tokens.

Since only the validators can propose/vote in the proposal, for token holders who delegate to validators, it is highly encouraged to work with your validators to vote on the proposals. Also, in order to encourage the participation of the voting process, additional token rewards may be distributed to validators who voted in the proposals. The detailed plan will be announced later.

How does it work?

The governance app is available at https://governance.harmony.one. To interact with it, you need to connect your One Wallet or Metamask extension, same as using Metamask on Ethereum. Note that you have to connect with the ONE address which is registered as a validator on the Harmony network and make sure you are on the latest OneWallet version, because older versions might not have support for voting. Once connected, you are able to create a proposal (if you are elected) and vote (no matter you are elected or unelected).The voting power is equal to the number of staked ONE tokens on your validator regardless you are elected or not.

Only elected validators can create proposals, while unelected validators are still allowed to vote on the proposals, enabling them a voice of their own. The proposal stays pending for the first 7 days after creation, so that all validators have time to get familiar with the topic and the impact of the proposal’s results.
After the initial 7 days, the voting period starts and lasts for 14 days. Once you submit your vote, you cannot change it. The voting power is equal to a validator’s total ONE token staked, and can vary in terms of voting power depending on delegation or undelegation. We have made this choice to passively include delegators in the governance process. If a delegator does not agree with the vote of the validator he/she delegated to, he/she can simply redelegate to another validator, to support it’s vote.
Final snapshot of voting power is taken at the epoch in which the proposal closes, so with epochs passing, you might see your total voting power vary a bit. The staked amount of ONE tokens at that time is your final voting power. For a proposal to successfully pass, 66% of all the staked tokens is needed to reach a majority quorum.

Creating a proposal

To create a proposal navigate to the governance app, connect your One Wallet, then click on New proposal on the top right corner.

You can now start writing a new proposal:

1 — The title of the proposal.

2 — The body of the proposal; e.g. what you want people to vote on and any explanation, facts, examples, etc. The proposal should include the following key sections:

Summary: one short paragraph to describe the proposal
Background: background information of the proposal
Link: link to the detailed proposal and discussion in the forum
Motivation: why this proposal is needed and important
Specification: specific action or changes proposed in the proposal
Vote: Yes: what does it mean when vote yes; No: what does it mean when vote no

3 — Voting choices; you add choices for voting, minimum is 2, but you can always add more choices with the Add choice button below.

4 — The proposal will stay pending for 7 days, to ensure everyone can get familiar with the topic being voted on

5 — After the 7 days in pending mode are over, the voting on the proposal starts and lasts for 14 days.

6 — Publish once done with all previous steps and confirm with a signed message from your validator address via One Wallet.

Once you approve, the proposal will be quickly submitted. After that it will show under Pending until the initial 7 day period is over and it gets Active.

Voting on a proposal

To vote for a proposal, simply navigate to the Active tab and click on a proposal you want to vote on. Read what the proposal is about, select your choice and confirm with a signed message from your wallet:

After signing, you will quickly see your vote being added in:

That is it!

While voting please note:

all votes are final, once you approve your vote, you cannot undo or change it
Voting percentage shown will be compared to the total network stake, so it’s easy for anyone to see if a proposal passes the 66% threshold or not

We have already prepared two proposals that are open for discussion on our new forum section:

Looking Forward

In the future, we will want to add a general governance section, where all Harmony community members will be able to create and vote on proposals concerning some other aspects of Harmony. Additionally, we will support HRC-20 governance when applications reach a critical mass, which means that HRC-20 token projects will be able to have their own sub page for governing within their own dApp.

Both of these options will take into account the number of tokens (either ONE or HRC-20) that the submitter or voter holds in his wallet. The exact release date for this part of the governance is still to be determined.

On-chain governance app and the model are still being worked on. Once they are designed and implemented, it will replace the off-chain governance app using the similar frontend interface.

Become ONE with Harmony

Developers can build on Harmony today, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications. Harmony Mainnet supports state sharding with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting delegation and slashing.

We ❤️ Developers.

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