On November 8th Sesameseed hosted an AMA on Telegram to review the latest approved TRON proposals — Proposal 22 and Proposal 27 — and answer community questions. Present were Juliun Brabon CEO of Sesameseed and Humpty Calderon Head of Marketing at Sesameseed.

Below is a summary of the questions and answers from the event.

General TRON Proposal Information

What are TRON Proposals?

TRON Proposals are just parameters on the TRON Blockchain that are designed to be modified by the Governance System of TRON. These could be anything from activating specific features to setting values for rewards, etc.

How are Proposals created?

Proposals are created by TRON Foundation itself via an upgrade to its node software, JavaTron. Once created, any Super Representative can initiate voting on a proposal.

What purpose do Proposals serve?

These Proposals serve the purpose of allowing for real time fine tuning of the TRON Blockchain itself by consensus. It’s the means by which Super Representatives (SRs) determine the way specific aspects of the blockchain operate.

How have Proposals been initiated in the past?

In the past Proposals have been initiated in several ways. Some SRs have drafted letters to their communities, held polls with other SRs or outlined basic justification in an open forum for voting for a specific Proposal. Alternatively, TRON has initiated many Proposals in the past.

How does voting for a Proposal work?

Voting is conducted entirely at the discretion of the individual SR, but often the initiator of a Proposal will ask or campaign for votes for other SRs or provide justification for the reasoning behind their proposal.

In the case of TRON themselves, there is often less information provided when they initiate a Proposal from any of their SRs. In addition, they may have differing motivations from other SRs and so still need to campaign for votes.

Where are Proposals debated?

Often these proposals are debated in closed channels for SRs on Discord, Telegram, WeChat, Github, etc.

Can the community participate in these debates?

These are largely invitation only channels, created by the TRON Foundation itself, and so most are closed off to non-SRs. Some are closed off to any non-SR and SR Candidates.

Recently Sesameseed shared the link to a Proposal on GitHub. Is this a place where the community can debate and interact with TRON?

That’s a good way to interact directly with TRON. I would strongly recommend anyone interested to comment through the “Issues” section of TRON’s own GitHub. Beyond this an additional forum is certainly needed and something Sesameseed and other SRs have been campaigning for in the past.

How long are Proposals open for voting?

Once a Proposal has been initiated Voting can take place for 3 days. A total of 19 votes from currently seated SRs at the time the Proposal expires is needed to be considered passed.

What are the voting options available to SRs?

SRs can only Vote Yes for a Proposal. So not electing to vote is considered “abstaining”.

What happens if a Proposal fails?

A failed Proposal is simply not activate. It can be proposed again at any time.

Proposal 22

According to TRON, Proposal 22 aimed to “decentralized voting rewards”.

Did Sesameseed vote “Yes” for Proposal 22? What are the arguments for and against this Proposal?

No, Sesameseed did not. This Proposal allowed for the blockchain to directly reward voters, as part of an SR’s current “claim” system. This does several things, It enables SR’s to offload the burden of Vote Tracking to the TRON blockchain itself so that individual SR’s don’t need to perform transactions to send out rewards. This system also requires an SR to select what percentage of its rewards go directly back to voters.

How will this Proposal affect Sesameseed directly?

In the case of impact, this would obviously impact our ability to reward SEED to voters. However, we managed to adjust the parameter to prevent any change for votes. In addition, Tronscan is not equipped to display alternate rewards at this time. So the “rewards” section of the Vote / SR screen incorrectly displays the rewards provided by Sesameseed.

Proposal 27

According to TRON, Proposal 27 aimed to “modify the SR block reward to 16 TRX and the block staking reward for the first 127 SRs and partners to 160 TRX.”

Did Sesameseed vote “Yes” for Proposal 27? What are the arguments for and against this Proposal?

Sesameseed did vote Yes for the Proposal. We had a lengthy dialogue with other SR’s about this proposal, including a public forum on TRON’s GitHub. Some of the concerns were things like, disincentivizing the operation of Multiple Nodes, by any SR that was self-funded, while still providing enough incentive to actually operate a node (as the cost is considerable).

How does this Proposal affect the TRON ecosystem (e.g.: Super Representatives, Candidates, and voters)?

The real impact of this Proposal is in regards to the different in voting rewards between SRs. There is now much less difference between nodes the have more votes.

Only 1/10 of rewards are for block production today vs 2/3 in the past.

The impact is simply that, an SR can now have a much larger percentage of the total vote and generate much more TRX relative to the past reward mechanism. For voters this means more of their decision to vote should be in regards to Representation, and who they feel best represents them.

SEED Rewards

How does this change affect SEED rewards? And the number of SEED that come into circulation each day?

SEED rewards are always in direct relation to the Total Node rewards of Sesameseed across all chains it participates on. This change had a significant impact on SEED generated daily. Sesameseed jumped from earning ~45k TRX per day to 115k TRX per day, which elevated the SEED create to its maximum possible value of 100k SEED. 100k SEED are now being created daily and distributed in proportion to voters. TRX voters saw a significant improvement ~2.5x SEED rewards for voting on Sesameseed.

Interestingly the real winner in this was SEED holders, as More than 100k* current SEED peg on TRON was created, ~25,000 TRX is moving into the TRON peg daily, compared to ~4000 TRX daily previously. We’re just starting to see some more significant movement in the TRX Pegged value of SEED.

I would say that the Peg rate of TRX is growing today, ~5x as fast as it was a week ago

Note: For those unfamiliar with the SEED peg and why 100K SEED is worth noting should read this article we published.

Will changes to the pegged value of SEED effect Ontology SEED holder or stakers as well?

Absolutely. SEED Votes and Stakes on all chains with all of the tokens its pegged to. Holding 1 SEED on Ontology is like voting with ~1.05+ TRX on TRON according to the PEG. However, because many accounts such as SEEDGerminator, OpEx, and others are not eligible to receive SEED rewards, those are also distributed to SEED holders. The impact of this is the Voting power or “participation power” today is closer to 1.24. This means only ~5700 SEED is needed to generate 1 SEED daily on either TRON or Ontology.

Before we close this session, what do you think about the latest changes? Do you see them impacting the decision of who attempts to run a node?

The impact will have far reaching consequences. We’re at a time where I expect to see more, large entities participating in the staking system of TRON. This makes it that much more important to participate with Community SR’s and vote. Many of these are private entities, that threaten to push communities out of this system entirely. It’s important to participate in the system with SR’s directly, rather than passively through exchanges.