SORA & Polkaswap Decentralized Development Process

SORA aims to be a decentralized, multiverse economic system. Polkaswap is a decentralized exchange built on top of the SORA network. Therefore, having a decentralized and sustainable development process without any centralized control or single point of failure is vitally important.

Noriko Soramoto writing open source code in space

Since the launch of the SORA Substrate-based network and Polkaswap, development has been completely decentralized because community voting is needed to approve every software update and no single team that contributes to development has enough XOR tokens to control the on-chain voting outcomes. However, the process of development has been necessarily technical and hard for normal people to contribute to.

To make it easier for anyone to contribute to SORA, Polkaswap, and any other future app on the SORA network, we are happy to announce a new RFP (request for proposals) process, where anyone can propose new ideas for the SORA and/or Polkaswap roadmaps, then RFPs from development teams that include price quotations will be collected and voted on by the community. Finally, the winning development team(s) will deliver code and get payment when their code is incorporated into a runtime upgrade of the SORA network. The overall process looks something like this:

1. First, a user follows the template and creates an RFP Draft at https://github.com/sora-xor/rfps, making a pull request to merge it to the public RFP process.
2. On the GitHub pull request, users on GitHub will publicly debate the pros, cons, and details of the RFP, editing it as necessary. If there is apparent consensus that the RFP is a good idea and ready, it will then be merged into the repository.
3. The RFP is publicly announced, with a deadline, and proposals from development teams are accepted. The RFPs are all public and submitted to GitHub.
4. RFP responses will be studied and the non-spam proposals will be explained to and voted on by the community using XOR tokens, via on-chain voting.
5. The winning RFP team(s) will then work on the code as per their proposal(s) and upon delivery, their code will be reviewed by users on GitHub and upon merging, runtime upgrades to the network will distribute payments.

Alternatively, any entity can also, of their own volition and funding, write their own code and propose it for release on the SORA network, without having to go through the RFP process. In this way, participation is fully open and unlimited, but the RFP process will be used for community funded development.

Currently on-chain voting with XOR tokens is used, which is the same method for democracy as in Kusama and Polkadot. However, in the future the SORA Parliament will take over decision making like this, using random sortition to choose subsets of decision makers.