One of the key factors differentiating a decentralized platform from its centralized counterparts is the issue of governance — simply put, a decentralized platform gives decision-making power to its users, rather than to one single point of authority. Right now, XYO is still, for all intents and purposes, governed by the team here at XY. In the near future, we’ll be giving you, the users, the reins. Kevin Weiler, XYO’s Lead Blockchain Engineer, has been driving the development of our governance model, and explained to me the basics of how it will function.

Essentially, the goal of the XYO Governance Plan is to give users, geominers, and token holders control over every parameter of the XYO Network that affects output, whether that output is location data or XYO token rewards. We’ll do this through a mechanism called “partial-lock commit/reveal (PLCR) voting. PLCR voting allows for any XYO holder to participate in any and all votes, and weighs their votes based on their committed stake. Voting is both anonymous and secret, meaning that no individual’s votes will be revealed, and no one will know the results of a vote until after voting has concluded completely. There’s a technical write-up of PLCR, and a link to the Solidity code itself, here.

By implementing PLCR, XYO will always be a living project that is able to adapt to the needs of its users.Here are some of the potential items that Kevin anticipates being addressed through the XYO Governance Plan — this is by no means an exhaustive list:

Quorum requirements — i.e. how many diviners does it take to build consensus

Cost in XYO to make a request

XYO reward breakdown for miners

Timing and requirements for “staking”

Cost and requirements to propose a vote through PLCR

Maximum tokens staked in voting per user (to prevent “whales” from dominating governance)

Methods of preventing and eliminating bad actors

We intend to renounce our control of governance via the deployed contracts, in favor of PLCR voting on all re-parameterization going forward, once XYO controls less than 66% of the active diviners — at that point, we’ll feel there are enough active participants on the platform to move toward this next stage.

We’ll have technical details on how governance works, along with more details on our technical roadmap, in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

Johnny Kolasinski

Head of Community

XYO