Progressive decentralisation
Decentralisation is hard to do in practice and should be considered a process rather than a fixed state. In a previous article, I explored why decentralisation matters and where some of the pitfalls are in achieving decentralisation.
Decentralisation has been an important aspect of Tgrade from the early days when we were thinking about what we wanted to build, and it has always been the goal, to begin with, some degree of central control and work towards the path of decentralisation. For example, we designed Proof of Engagement as a consensus mechanism to address concerns we had in Proof of Stake around the concentration of power in a small number of validators. This addressed decentralisation by design. There are, however, other elements that were centralised to start the chain, such as the selection of the genesis validators to ensure the chain began with the node operators aligned to the project and some of the services that are needed to run the chain.
There remain some elements that will be decentralised as part of the process of progressive decentralisation.
The infrastructure needed to run the application used by the Validators, Oversight Community and to showcase how Trusted Circles work is currently run and managed by Confio. This will be moved to the community with several validators expressing an interest in running the necessary endpoints and one of them having a tool to manage the load balancing.
The next step in progressive decentralisation is the open-sourcing of the application (dapp.tgrade.finance). This is an important step as it is a valuable showcase in how to build a dApp for Tgrade and allows the community to build on it. We have had an interest in integrating further wallets and adding some further functionality which some tech teams have enquired about.
Furthermore, it acts as a nice example of how to build an application on Tgrade as it not only includes the governance tools but the means to issue tokens, permission them to Trusted Circles, and to trade them on an automated market maker. A full description of the dApp is in this blog post Create a Trusted Circle, add a Digital Asset, Permission the Trading Pair, and Trade in Tgrade.
We are making the final changes to the code base and adding the Apache 2 license.
The Tgrade dApp will be open-sourced on 10th November 2022
In parallel, there is an initiative in the community to run a testnet for Tgrade; again, this is significant as this has been coordinated and run by the core team at Confio and represents a further step towards decentralisation. An active testnet allows businesses building on a community testnet to run their smart contracts and Trusted Circles in an environment that is very close to the mainnet.
As businesses begin building on Tgrade and start organizing Trusted Circles, deploying smart contracts and the tooling to support their businesses, the progressive decentralisation continues as it is no longer the core team building but the businesses and their tech teams. The core team will continue maintaining the blockchain layer and changes needed by the businesses at the protocol level.
Decentralisation is a key priority to Tgrade, and the progressive decentralisation is a process and not one event; it is exciting to see how the community is building around Tgrade and watch the process evolve.
