This week Elastos released “Spotlight Series 2: Sidechains + Scalability” while Elastos Chief Architect, Yipeng Su gave an important update on CR and the CRC.

Let’s recap.

Technical Dynamics

In order to better serve election participants and to provide global partners participating in the Elastos DPoS Supernode Election with a positive experience, Elastos invited certain members of the community to download and experience the beta-version wallet to provide us with suggestions and feedback. Elastos technical team will conduct optimizations and improvements based on these suggestions.

Cyber Republic

Check out the latest Cyber Republic Weekly Report here: https://blog.cyberrepublic.org/2019/03/05/weekly-report-march-3-2019/

Participate in the Cyber Republic forums at https://forum.cyberrepublic.org. All logins are linked to your Cyber Republic login, this includes the forums and, in the future, your Elastos DIDs.

Community News

– In our Spotlight Series 2, we take an in-depth look at how Elastos addresses scalability with our unique sidechain architecture. https://news.elastos.org/spotlight-series-2-elastos-sidechains-and-scalability/

To view article in PDF:

– An update on DPoS Supernode Election Process was made as follows: “The number of votes per ELA has been amended to a maximum of 36 votes”

– Feng Han was featured on an interview with BBOD Research sharing the history, future development and specific application of Elastos project.

Events

Hong Kong: March 13-14

Rong Chen will be at Token2049 in Hong Kong where he will be on a panel called, “The Decentralized Future: Interoperability and Scalability,” with representatives from Aion, Wanchain, Celer Network, and ICON. For more information: https://www.token2049.com/

Elastos + Top Network

Learn to Build on the Modern Internet with Elastos & TOP Network. These will be developer focused meetups on how to build on the Elastos Ecosystem co-hosted with our partner TOP Network.

Lead Organizer: Henry Nong

Promotion/Marketing: Tong Tung Khanh, Farid Rached

Speakers: Clarence Liu, Noah Wang

Lead Organizer: Farid Rached

Promotion/Marketing: Natthanant Patcharasaksakol (Lah), Farid Rached

Speakers: Clarence Liu, Noah Wang

Elastos Talk | Meetup with CR Organizing Committee Member

On March 1st, we invited Elastos Chief Architect and CR Organizing Committee member, Yipeng Su to be a guest on “Elastos Talk” to present his understanding of and thoughts on CR.

Cyber Republic’s vision is to establish a self-operating and self-managing community for contributors and developers that can exist independently of Elastos, but with the common objective of developing Elastos into a successful global project.

Please visit the CR website at https://www.cyberrepublic.org, where you can follow CR dynamics, publish your own opinions and suggestions to promote the development of CR and Elastos.

The following is a transcript of Elastos Chief Architect and member of CR Organizing committee Yipeng Su’s presentation:

Hello Elastos community partners. I am Yipeng Su. Today’s presentation will have two parts. The first part will be about what the CR is and what the CRC is. The second part will be about what the CRC is currently doing and the thinking behind its affairs.

What is the CRC?

A community made up of strong, multidimensional technology groups. Their leaders, developers and organizers are working together in our community to expand the reach of Elastos. Membership is open to all.

Its English name is Cyber Republic. The key word here is “republic,” which is an ancient kind of democratic system. CR is the general term for the Elastos community that expresses our perfect vision for the development of the Elastos community. The CR is made up of ELA holders and Elastos contributors, among which includes the Elastos Foundation, all ecosystem partners, and all people and groups willing to contribute to the Elastos community.

Based on the concept of CR, we further proposed the CRC. In addition to AUXPoW+DPoS, the CRC is the third Elastos consensus mechanism. The goal of proposing the CRC is to provide the community with a consensus-based mechanism for community policy-making that can resolve community disputes and allow community members to participate in Elastos community governance, as well as rewarding and incentivizing community members who contribute to the community. CRC can be seen as the top-level design for the CR community, but the CRC does not aim to give the community a complete community organizational structure. It wouldn’t be possible with such a loosely organized community. The essence of the community should be to grow from the ground up, and the goal of proposing the CRC is to give the community cohesive guidance during this process. Everyone says that blockchain has changed the relations of production and we hope that the CRC is able to change the traditional concept of community.

One of our initial motivations for proposing the CRC was seeing the hard forks of BTC and ETH. These cases were essentially community disputes. Neither the BTC community nor the ETH community had a consensus mechanism for solving community disputes. We hope to be able to resolve these community disputes within the confines of the community. This was our motivation for proposing the CRC. So, on this foundation, we also discovered that after there were community policy-making mechanisms in place, we would be able to undertake more affairs.

We say that the CRC is a consensus mechanism, but it is different from traditional blockchain consensus, like POW and DPoS, which are used for making blockchain ledger recordings and are implemented by machines. We hope that the CRC will be conferred to humans from machines, so that humans can be the supernodes of the blockchain, reaching consensus and making policy decisions for the community. In the CRC, ELA-holders are just like nodes in the DPoS consensus mechanism and the committee members in the CR are just like the supernodes of DPoS.

In addition to a difference in the main body for policy-making, the difference between DPoS and CRC is that one is a machine and the other is human. The policy-making goals are also different. DPoS aims to make policies for the secure recording, the ledger and blockchain. In contrast, the goal of the CRC is less defined, but we can generally define it as community affairs. Within the consensus mechanism that is the CRC, there are two major roles. The first is that normal community members and all ELA-holders in the Elastos community are all members of the CR. Another role is that CRC committee members are elected by CR community members.

Each CR community member has the right to vote and participate in elections. In addition, CR community members can also supervise and impeach elected CRC committee members. Each community can monitor their CRC committee members in good faith and can impeach CRC committee members who they believe are unfit through voting. Supervision and impeachment are done through our wallet and the process will also be recorded on the blockchain. Additionally, each community member can supervise and oppose proposals from CRC committee members, meaning that after proposals for community affairs made by CRC committee members have passed, if the majority of community members disagree, they may oppose the proposal so that it might be scrapped.

Inside the CRC, there is another role, which is that CRC committee members are community representatives elected through blockchain voting. They are the supernodes of the community who make policy decisions on behalf of the community. In addition to the rights and obligations that ordinary community members have, CRC committee members have two extra rights: the first is the right to make proposals according to their own views for plans of action for community affairs, and the second is the right to vote on proposals initiated by other CRC committee members.

The CRC is currently set to have 12 people. These 12 people together constitute the members of the CRC. Some people may have misunderstood the CRC as being similar to a board of directors or a council, but in reality, it is not. The CRC committee is only a union and in principle, CRC members do not need to know each other or communicate with each other. They don’t need to have common goals and do not need to coordinate their work. Everything is based on experience and voting. The relationship between CRC committee members is similar to the relationship between DPoS supernodes. This really isn’t what you’d normally call an organization.

All community members preparing to participate in the CRC committee member election must undergo real name verification through Elastos DID. Same as the supernodes, they must also deposit 5,000 ELA to obtain eligibility to participate in the election. Normally, the term of office of CRC committee members is one year. One month before the term is complete, a new CRC committee member election will be initiated. Meanwhile, in the event that a CRC committee member is unable to fulfill normal professional duties, they will be discharged from the CRC. When the number of CRC committee members does not reach eight, a committee member election will automatically be initiated. Inability to fulfill normal professional duties may refer to leaving the post, being impeached or not working for a long period of time.

During the time when the CRC committee member is fulfilling their duties, community members can vote to impeach committee members with whom they are unsatisfied at any time. When the number of votes to impeach a committee member exceeds 20% of votes corresponding with the total circulating quantity of ELA, the member being impeached will automatically be discharged of their post (a final decision regarding the number of votes required to impeach a committee member has not yet been reached and is still under discussion). Coming back to the rights of CRC committee members previously discussed, the difference between the rights of CRC committee members and those of normal community members really revolves around the right to raise a proposal, so let’s talk a little bit more about that.

Regarding Proposals

Raising proposals is the core component of the work that CRC committee members do. As such, in order to raise a proposal, the topic in question must be submitted to the CRC for approval and all actions related to proposals must be saved on the blockchain in the form of transactions, which can be viewed through the wallet app. In principle, there is no limit to the content of a proposal, but usually, a good proposal will include several elements: one, the topic must be related to Elastos community development and technology development; two, the proposal will raise a problem and the solution to the problem; and three, the proposal will name a person or group responsible for implementing the proposal and will include a timeline and a budget for related expenditures.

Each proposal will comprise a multiple-signature transaction, signed and voted upon by CRC committee members. After a proposal is raised, CRC committee members must cast their vote on the proposal transaction using their wallet signature within one week. Once the number of votes reaches 2/3 passing, the proposal will go into effect. If the proposal does not pass within one week, it will be invalidated. After a proposal has passed the CRC committee member vote, there will be a 7-day notice period, during which time all CR community members can see the proposal in their wallet app. They can oppose proposals that they do not support by voting and once the number of opposing votes exceed an amount of votes equivalent to 10% of total circulating quantity of ELA, the proposal will be invalidated. Once a proposal has passed the vote and it is not opposed by community members, then the proposal will go into effect.

If an effective proposal has designated a quantity of tokens and a recipient’s address for the purposes of executing the proposal, then that budgeted sum of money will be automatically transferred there. Of course, consideration must be given to the complexity of implementation of some proposals. It requires a long capital cycle, as well as supervision. It needs to be adjusted during the process of implementation, while also needs professional personnel to lead, so we have designated the CRC Secretariat to implement pertinent proposals and to assist the CRC committee members in making policy decisions.

Prior to this, I mentioned some numbers, such as committee member impeachment requires that the number of votes must exceed the number of votes which corresponds to 20% of total circulating ELA, and that for community members to oppose a proposal, the number of votes must exceed a number of votes equal to 10% of total circulating ELA. These specific numbers are not final and the reason we are raising these number comes from the need to protect ordinary community members.

Current Matters of the Organizing Committee and Thoughts on Proposals

Currently, the CRC Organizing Committee is mainly comprised of three individuals: Kevin Zhang, attorney Feng Zhang, and I. The CRC Organizing committee mainly has two duties. The first is to establish the CRC and its technology, being that a large portion of the CR must be done through the blockchain. The other function is to simulate the operations of the official CRC committee member roles. Currently, everyone can already see many proposals that we have raised on the CR website, which is actually the simulation process.

Speaking of the CR website, I mentioned that all action of the CRC will revolve around proposals, which has given rise to some other actions. For example, a suggestions module has been added to the CR website, where community members can submit their suggestions and opinions and other community members can discuss them, show their support or opposition, and even rank them. This will make it easier for CRC committee members to see everyone’s suggestions. Currently, there is already a significant number of suggestions about community and ecosystem development.

When the CRC committee members feel that a suggestion is reasonable and mature, they can raise it as an official proposal by bringing it to the committee for discussion. Additionally, there is another tentative plan for the website which is a bid system, but currently, it has not yet been implemented. The bid system was an idea proposed by the committee, but the idea might not have been entirely mature, or it is possible that no one was able to implement it, so at this time we need it to be completed by the bid system. The goal for doing all of these things on the website is to contribute to the core of proposals, while also strengthening interaction between community members, as well as the interaction between community members and CRC committee members.

Useful links:

A Developer Beginner’s Guide

Developer Portal in Cyber Republic

Developer Documentation on Github

Elastos Smartweb Alpha

Elastos Community

Elastos Community Global