NEAR x ASTAR: DECENTRALISED DECISION-MAKING
How NEAR and Astar are Reshaping Decentralised Governance.
Decentralisation is a multi-faceted concept. While easy to view purely from a technical perspective, it’s crucial to consider the governance aspect: who decides on changes and how are these decisions made?
Most contemporary Web3 projects begin with small teams. They nurture their community, introduce a token, and develop. Driven by the practical difficulties of decision-making within large groups, this initial centralised approach is echoed in Vitalik Buterin’s comment, ‘the optimal governance structure for early-stage projects is founder dictatorship’.
Astar and NEAR were founded in response to a distinct need for protocols that address issues like the lack of smart contracts on Polkadot or a Layer-1 supporting the Open Web. As they establish their ecosystems, the challenge becomes to gradually empower each community to participate in the decision-making processes.
Understanding this shift towards decentralised power requires an appreciation of credible neutrality.
Credible Neutrality: A Foundation of Trust
Open-source Protocols, the infrastructure supporting use cases from money to smart contract execution, must be accessible and reliable to succeed. This is where credible neutrality comes in. A high-stakes system that neither discriminates or shows undue favour becomes more dependable. Users know exactly what to expect and can trust in the network’s transparency. The path to this credibility? Effective governance.
Governance: Power to the Community
In essence, governance revolves around decision-making and the exercise of authority through certain processes, structures, and systems. For blockchains, governance means empowering communities to actively shape and maintain their ecosystems, such as deciding on resource allocation and protocol upgrades.
Off-chain governance, seen in protocols like Uniswap, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, takes place in external forums, with changes implemented after gaining substantial community support. Conversely, on-chain governance involves submitting proposals for a token or signature-based vote, recording each vote on the blockchain.
Preventing Exploitation in On-chain Governance
In theory, letting everyone interested in a protocol’s success partake in decision-making sounds ideal. However, the risk of Sybil attacks — where the system can be exploited by creating multiple identities — exists. Though completely preventing this form of attack is impossible, there are strategies to hinder such exploitation, including:
Proof of Personhood: Verification tools and services authenticate a voter’s personhood. NEAR’s Digital Collective collaborates with Fractal, which uses face scans for verification.
Proof of Humanity: A protocol that allows identity registration for repeated use in apps without repeated verification.
Gitcoin Passport: Utilises various data points, including Twitter profiles, Google accounts, and on-chain activity, to confirm human identity.
With verification settled, voting rights distribution comes next, through mechanisms like
- Token-weighted voting: The more tokens one holds, the more voting power they possess.
- Time-weighted voting: The longer one locks their tokens, the more their vote weight increases.
- Quadratic voting: For nuanced decisions, participants receive a vote budget that decreases quadratically based on the number of votes given to an option.
NEAR and Astar: Decentralising Power and Building Governance Frameworks
NEAR: holding fast to the principles of an Open Web and power decentralisation, NEAR has taken initial steps with the NEAR Digital Collective, aiming for a cohesive structure for the NEAR ecosystem’s collective decision-making. The path involves establishing a community treasury, allocating to grassroots DAOs overseeing marketing, creators, and developers. A governance working group has been tasked with defining the NEAR constitution, the digital collective’s guiding principles.
Astar: as a Polkadot ecosystem parachain, Astar could merely implement Polkadot’s governance pallets, but the team recognises that each chain is unique. While not becoming a DAO, Astar intends to disempower potential ‘whales’ and empower those contributing to its growth. Their leading idea is inspired by the Japanese Keiretsu system and encourages collaboration and incentive alignment across participants.
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Overall, governance in crypto is nascent. The good news is that we have centuries of governance examples we can learn from. If anything, the projects that succeed will likely be those that leverage web3 to address downfalls of existing governance systems and better align incentives to coordinate users.
Written by @near_intern
Edited by @achildhoodhero
About Astar Network
Astar is Japan’s most popular smart contract platform supporting both EVM and WebAssembly (Wasm) environments, as well as interoperability using a Cross-Virtual Machine. Backed by the shared security of Polkadot, Astar shines brilliantly on its own within a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem, driving international adoption and pioneering consumer interest in Web3.
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About NEAR Protocol
NEAR aims to onboard a billion users to the limitless possibilities of Web3 with the Blockchain Operating System (BOS). Leveraging its high-performance, carbon-neutral protocol, which is swift, secure, and scalable, NEAR offers a common layer for browsing and discovering the open web.
