The ZenCash Treasury and Voting model is the most elegant Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) model in the market. We are very excited to work with IOHK and InfoPulse to deliver a highly complex programmatic solution to the ZenCash Treasury system.

As an interim solution, the legal entity for ZenCash, allocates 8.5% of mining rewards to fund integrations, engineering, marketing, research and development, and more.

This funding model enables ZenCash to continue growing…even in a down-market.

No human-in-the-loop: A DAO for fairness & transparency

I previously described the ZenCash and IOHK Partnership that is set to deliver two important projects:

DAO Treasury and Voting proof-of-concept that enables a programmatic approach to allocate resources. A Scalability Study to evaluate next generation blockchain solution to ensure ZenCash is able to scale.

The main purpose of the ZenCash DAO Treasury and Voting model is to establish a decentralized and censorship-resistant funding mechanism for development and maintenance of the ZenCash platform.

This model mixes years worth of economic theory and cryptography to alleviate voter apathy.

Voter apathy? Think about the U.S. two-party system. At times, you may or may not agree with the Republican and/or Democrat parties, but you don’t believe a third-party has a chance to win. Therefore, you vote for one of the two instead or abstain from voting.

Think of a voting system that cannot be manipulated, where individuals are paid to vote, and voting results are kept secret until the end. Or a voting system where you can vote to fund projects you value. How will this type of system impact our lives? We believe the ZenCash DAO Treasury and Voting model will change the world and be implemented in various types of organizations or even countries!

How does the ZenCash DAO work?

The ZenCash Treasury Model is an inclusive, provably fair, and transparent economic system with incentives to participate.

A funding pool is available for proposals. The funding process occurs during a fixed amount of blocks (approximately one month). We’ll define this period as a treasury epoch. In order to vote, Zen stakeholders will have to lock an amount of ZEN as collateral at the beginning of each epoch. The stake will be kept on a special smart contract address that returns the funds at the end of the treasury epoch. Stakeholders will receive X amount of ballots, proportionally to the stake they have locked up. Stakeholders will not know the value of their stake. Anyone can submit a proposal, there will be a small submission fee to discourage spam. Eligible Zen stakeholders review and vote on proposals. Results are hidden using Results are hidden using zk-SNARKS cryptography Votes are weighted according to stake and is not public. Zen stakeholders can delegate voting responsibilities to trusted users. Ballot results are secret until the winner is announced to ensure fairness. Votes are counted. Approved proposals are sorted out in descending order, from the highest positive vote count to the least. The system will fund every proposal in this order until it reaches 90% of the funding pool. The remaining 10% of the funding pool is allocated to reward voters. At the end of the treasury epoch, the locked funds (stake) is returned to the voters along with their respective compensation (proportional to their stake) for participating in the voting process.

When is the ZenCash DAO going live?

IOHK is delivering the ZenCash DAO Treasury and Voting proof of concept in 2Q 2018. We are working together to ensure we can translate the mathematical concepts into a programmatic implementation. This last week, the ZenCash Software Architect, Alberto Garoffolo, met with IOHK and InfoPulse partners to discuss IOHK’s research in Kiev, Ukraine. As a decentralized organization, it’s helpful to have onsite working sessions to ensure our teams understand the technical intricacies. Some takeaways from the working sessions: IOHK’s research and development for ZenCash Treasury Model is an elegant solution

The mathematical-to-technical implementation is complex and has dependencies on other projects ZenCash has in the pipeline, i.e. sidechaining

Additional working sessions are required prior to scoping the Treasury implementation from the R&D proof-of-concept to backlog items

Our Treasury model is a unique feature that differentiates us from other projects We are excited to be in the forefront of development and bringing fairness to public blockchain governance! Let us know what you think about this research! [yop_poll id=”2″]