At 01:30 AM UTC on May 30th, the Athens A amendment was activated in the Tezos network. This is a significant milestone for the whole blockchain technology sphere, as it is one of the first successful implementations of on-chain governance regarding serious protocol changes in practice. Not only it indicates the possibility of changing a protocol without the creation of a hard fork, but also shows that voting on the platform matters can be and should be offered to its users.

NOT ENOUGH VOTES

Although Athens voting saw ~85% participation, other platform votes show major under-appreciation of governance. For example, the latest votes on MakerDAO and Aragon platforms shown the participation of only 5% and 7% of voting nodes, respectively. Moreover, the Aragon voting shows imperfect results of votings with low participation, as one whale changed the voting outcome alone. We believe that these numbers are quite frustrating, and all possible nodes should vote to make sure that the platform conforms everyone’s needs. Even from the Tezos’ 85%, a large part of bakers voted only after several reminders.

Voting should be incentivized, or the voting apathy of this kind should be punished.

VOTE TO THE PEOPLE?

Another important fact is that the voting in Tezos is available to bakers, not the delegators. The Athens voting saw up to 216 bakers vote for the changes that would impact tens of thousands of users.

We think that more people should have a say in the votings on the platform so that their votes represent the real opinion of the platform users precisely. It is yet unclear, how this can be achieved in Tezos, but this need it quite obvious. Several bakers held their own votes among the delegators to collect their opinions, but this practice still doesn’t provide enough clarity in the final vote, and, of course, just several out of 200 bakers doing that is too few.

MORE COMMUNICATION

All in all, we believe that communication and cooperation among bakers are necessary. Apparently, there weren’t enough mentions regarding the Athens A amendment in the Tezos media, some bakers were unaware of the voting during the first period. Together with that, lots of delegators were unaware as well, which led to a lack of their input, in terms of sharing their opinions with the bakers, and making sure they vote after all.