HOPR Governance Update

Throughout August and September, HOPR ran its biggest ever governance experiment. It will also be the last, as the result was to trigger a major evolution in community governance.

This blog will summarize the experiment, the results, and some of the consequences. As always, the full process and results can be seen on verified on our forum and Snapshot space.

The Proposals

There were 13 proposals in all. The primary proposal, from which all the others followed, was:

Should a HOPR Community Trust be established in the BVI to manage HOPR Community assets using governance processes established via the eighth HOPR governance experiment?

The secondary proposals focused on specifics of the governance processes, down to the level of individual parameters. All of the parameters and processes suggested by the HOPR Association and community members during the discussion period were accepted, so no follow-up governance process was triggered.

Results and Analysis

Every proposal received at least 89% support, with votes from at least 150 distinct tokenholders. Vote power was calculated quadratically, so we’re confident that this represents true consensus rather than being steamrollered by whales. More than 130 people were active participants in the month-long discussion period. Relative to the number of token holders, these figures once again place HOPR in the upper echelons of web3 governance participation.

The full vote tallies can be seen at our snapshot space under the respective proposals.

Community Trust

The most significant development is the establishment of a new trust in the British Virgin Islands to manage the HOPR community funds (the funds raised at the launch of the HOPR token).

This trust will be a purpose trust, whose legal purpose will be to follow the processes voted for by the community. Failure to follow the processes would leave the trustee open to legal action, so this will give the community far more certainty that governance wishes will actually be carried out — currently token holders must trust that the HOPR Association will implement proposals, with no formal recourse if they don’t.

New Processes

As part of this new setup, new governance processes are required, but these will be very familiar to anyone who has already participated in HOPR governance.

Important new additions are token balance thresholds for making a proposal and quora for valid votes. A distinction is also drawn between proposals which feature only on-chain interactions, those with off-chain consequences and proposals which would alter the governance processes or the structure of the trust somehow.

Another entirely new feature is the audit requirement. For legal and security reasons, each proposal must be signed off by a third-party in two regards:

- Is the proposal legal to implement?
- Is any code contained in the proposal safe to run, and will it achieve what the proposal describes?

These additional security features should help to protect against the kinds of governance attacks we’ve seen various DAOs subjected to in recent months.

In addition, an emergency council of token holders will be established for situations which require the processes to be truncated or circumvented. Elections for these roles will begin later in the year.

An outline of the full proposals and parameters can be found here.

New Governance Platform

One of the most exciting decisions is to build a brand new governance platform to support these processes. Codenamed Lexicon, the platform will serve several important services:

- First, it will provide improved governance tooling, making it easier to participate in governance, for both token holders and those responsible for governing. This will be particularly important as governance continues to develop within the HOPR ecosystem, and different parts have different processes and eligibility requirements (e.g., governance of the protocol itself will only be open to node runners).

- Second, it provides a measure of legal clarity for all parties, something which is increasingly important in the current regulatory environment.

The community has generously provided 50,000 DAI in initial funding, on similar terms to their investment in RPCh. Some team members from HOPR will be moving over to Lexicon starting in October, either in a full-time capacity or splitting work between both projects as needed.

Development work has begun. We’re currently speccing out the design for the new platform, with development to begin in earnest in November. The first version will be quite barebones, using tooling already familiar to HOPR governance participants (Snapshot, Discourse, etc.)

The intent is that the platform will act as protector under BVI law, ensuring that the community trust conducts itself in accordance with its purpose.

Next Steps and Timeline

The next step is to complete the registration of the trust entity in the British Virgin Islands and begin development of the MVP. Both processes are already underway, and the MVP involves upgrading existing tools, rather than building from scratch; therefore, we’re hopeful that the first truly decentralized HOPR governance can begin in December!

Rich McDowell
HOPR Governance Steward

Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G

Forum: https://forum.hoprnet.org
Staking: https://hub.hoprnet.org