The first annual election of the trust protectors of the Dash DAO Irrevocable Trust is now complete, and Dash Watch has completed its independent audit of the results. We are pleased to confirm the following candidates have been elected by the Dash network as the trust protectors for the 2019–2020 term.

Pieter Bakhuijzen

Raleigh Barrett

Michael Lewis

Mark Mason

Eric Sammons

Perry Woodin

Thank you to all of the candidates and masternodes who participated in the election. We now have a fully independent body representing the beneficiaries (a.k.a., the masternode owners), and we will immediately begin confirming each of the candidates to their positions. A special thanks is due the Dash Watch team for supporting this effort and ensuring the election was properly monitored and the results arrived at independently.

We are now in the final steps to full implementation of the governance vision for Dash Core Group that started with the formation of DCG in July 2017. The Trust, upon its formation in December of 2017, was granted 100% of the shares in DCG. With this election complete, the trust itself is now overseen by independent trust protectors and trustees. The network can now affect change at DCG through decision proposals the trust protectors can implement, without resorting to defunding DCG (an action I’ve referred to in the past as the “nuclear option”). We believe this creates far greater accountability of DCG to the network. Indeed, this establishes a legally binding fiduciary duty to the Trust and ultimately the network itself.

We are very proud of this milestone. Our model stands in stark contrast to many other projects, which frequently feature foundations, companies, or founders funds which lack true accountability to the communities of users they are supposed to serve. In the short-term, I suspect that the importance of our model will be underestimated. Over the fullness of time, that will change.

More information on the elections and the associated processes can be found in the following links if you are interested in learning more.

Details on the trust and elections

Raw vote data

Dash Watch certification

Valid MN list at 11:59pm March 31st (captured on three network nodes)

Tally software used to filter valid votes

Post explaining the tally software

EDIT 24-Apr-2019: The above links incorrectly includes a masternode list that filtered for ENABLED status. Because the voting instructions distributed prior to the election provided ambiguous language that “active” masternodes would be eligible to vote, we decided with Dash Watch to expand the eligible list of masternodes to be inclusive under a more liberal interpretation of what might be reasonably interpreted as an “active” masternode. While we intend to be clearer about this in the future by designating only ENABLED status masternodes will be eligible for elections, for this election we include all active masternodes, including pre-enabled and other statuses (as long as the 1,000 Dash collateral UTXO was present), in the final eligibility list. Regardless of which list of masternodes is utilized, the resulting list of winners are those we published, and remain correct.

The link to the MN list we used for the final tally is below, which when run against the tally software and vote data already posted correctly matches the published vote counts: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/dashevo-infra/files/mnlist-dashwatch-20190402T0054.json