TDROP On-chain Governance launches on Theta mainnet, paving the way for decentralized governance of Theta blockchain

We are thrilled to announce that the TDROP Governance site is released on Theta Mainnet. This is the first step in TDROP stakers directly governing how the TDROP token rewards and its other parameters like liquidity mining, and will serve as the testbed for on-chain governance for the THETA token and Theta protocol itself. This is critically important to decentralizing the protocol, giving power to the tokenholders, and making Theta a equitable blockchain for all!

Each user’s voting rights for a given TDROP proposal will be equal to their share of staked TDROP as a percentage of the total TDROP staked. You can access the TDROP governance site here: https://governance.thetadrop.com/.

In the blog, we will review the steps for you to participate in TDROP governance:

Step 1. Delegate voting power (from Theta Wallet to Metamask).

Step 2. Vote for a proposal.

Step 3. Create your own proposal.

Step 1. Delegate voting power (from Theta Wallet to Metamask)

To start, open your Theta Wallet where you have your TDROP stored. This example is on Testnet, but the governance functionality is now live on the Mainnet.

Click to the Stakes section, then click Deposit Stake . Select TDROP from the dropdown menu and enter the amount you would like to stake. (If you already have your TDROP staked, you can skip this step.)

Your staked tokens must now be delegated to a Theta address that will have the commensurate voting power of those staked TDROP. This must be an address you can access via Metamask, since you will be using Metamask to interact with the TDROP governance portal. In this example, we ‘delegate’ to the same address that we staked from, so we retain that voting power at our address. You can see that our voting power is equivalent to 1.3% of the overall voting power. You can also choose to delegate that voting power to another one of your Theta addresses or another address accessible from Metamask.

Step 2. Vote for a proposal

Next, head to the TDROP Governance portal at https://governance.thetadrop.com/ . Click the “Connect Wallet” button at the top right corner to connect your Metamask wallet to the site, and select the Metamask account address that you just delegated your voting power to. You can also see there are ~9m Votes delegated to this Theta address (top right corner). Remember to send a small amount of TFuel (e.g. 10 TFuel) to this wallet as the gas fee for voting.

On the TDROP governance site you can view existing proposals, vote on them with your voting power, or create your own new proposals. Click on one of the existing proposals to see its details.

Note that to vote on a proposal, you’d need to delegate votes to your Metamask wallet before the proposal was created. For example, if a proposal was created on June 1st, 2022, and a user Alice delegated her votes from Theta Wallet to Metamask on June 2nd, she won’t be able to vote for this proposal. However, she should be able to vote for proposals created after June 2nd. This is to prevent “double voting” attacks.

Proposals are voted on based on the following rules:

Voting period: Once a proposal is submitted, it can be voted on by TDROP stakers. By default the voting period is set to 100,800 blocks (roughly 7 days).

Vote queuing: After the voting period, anyone can queue the proposal through the dashboard UI.

Proposal execution: 2 days after the proposal is queued, anyone can execute the proposal through the dashboard UI. The smart contract will count the votes, decide if the execution criteria are met. If yes, the proposal will be executed.

Proposals are passed when they meet both of these conditions:

• 1. They receive more Yes votes than No votes
• 2. They receive at least 500 million Yes votes

Next we’ll click on Vote For to add our 9m votes to the proposal. This will again call a Metamask transaction for you to submit the vote on Theta blockchain.

Once the transaction is processed, you can see that the votes for have been increased by our 9m votes.

Step 3. Create your own proposal

In this example we are creating a new proposal to raise the TDROP staking reward per block. After clicking Create Proposal on the homepage, you can set the Proposed Action, the proposed amount for the parameter you are suggesting to change, and add a description of the proposal. It’s recommended that you thoroughly describe the proposed change and reasoning behind it as well as address any potential concerns about the proposal so that voters can properly evaluate it. Note, in this initial release proposals are limited to a set of whitelisted types such as adjusting TDROP staking block rewards and changing liquidity mining parameters. After evaluating how proposals are submitted and passed within this initial set, governance will be opened to more proposals.

Once you have completed your proposal, click “Submit your proposal”. This will call a Metamask transaction that you can send from your TDROP-delegated address to make the proposal on Theta blockchain. Note that your Metamask wallet needs to have at least 5,000,000 votes to create a proposal.

Back on the governance portal homepage, we can see our new proposal listed among the others

Since no one has voted yet, the vote is currently 0 for and 0 against for our new proposal.

TDROP governance represents an important next step in decentralizing the Theta protocol. In addition to giving the community power over TDROP, it will serve as the testbed for onchain governance of Theta blockchain itself, as the final step in decentralizing Theta blockchain. We look forward to seeing the Theta community creating proposals and deciding for themselves the rules for TDROP staking, earning, and liquidity mining!