EOS Canada has been involved with the formation of the first proposal to be put forth to the EOS community for a Worker Proposal System. We wanted to offer a brief overview to help everyone understand what is being proposed.

We would like to stress that this is a community project and not an EOS Canada project. This project was built with input from the community and iterated many times to incorporate as much of the feedback that was received as possible. This article is for educational purposes, to explain what may be set up on the EOS mainnet. The proposal would have to be passed through a referendum to be accepted by the community.

What is Currently Happening

Currently on the EOS mainnet, 4% of inflation is accruing into an account called `eosio.saving`. That account grows on average by 109,000 EOS per day. The intention was that these tokens should be used to fund projects for the EOS community, proposed by anyone who has a project that the community deems worthwhile to fund. The mechanism for how to select which proposals should be funded, and which should not be, is what is currently being developed.

Creating a New WPS Account

To segregate the funds that continually accrue into the `eosio.saving` account, it is first proposed to create a new account called `eosio.wps`.

Transfer 1 Million EOS and Burn the Balance

The next steps would be to transfer 1 million EOS tokens into the `eosio.wps` account, and then burn the remaining balance from `eosio.saving`. That account would immediately start building up its funds again, but would be brought down to a more sensible amount. Many in the community were worried about the potential honeypot that a single account holding a large sum of tokens could become.

By placing 1 million tokens into a new account for the Worker Proposal System, the EOS community would be saying that they are willing to allocate at most 1 million tokens to figure out if this design is the correct one to work under, fund a few proposals that are needed as soon as possible by the chain, and limit the amount of fraud/negligence by not exposing the entire `eosio.saving` account in any way at all.

It should also be noted that there is no goal to allocate the entire 1 million tokens, as all that are unspent will be returned to the `eosio.saving` account. Rather, it should be seen only as an upper limit of what could potentially be allocated.

This will allow the chain to collect some data on whether or not a system like this is worthwhile to continue on with, what changes could be made, and how we could do better as a community going forward.

Creation of the Emergency Category

Now that 1 million tokens would be allocated into a new account, it would then be under the control of a category, called the Emergency Category (or more properly called the Bootstrapping Category). The purpose of this would be to only allocate funds towards urgent needs of the chain, and defer everything else until other categories are implemented.

The Emergency Category will be run as a committee of seven representatives who will help to filter out any non-urgent proposals, while allowing the community as a whole to decide on the proposals which have been shown to possibly be urgent in nature.

Five New Categories

Going forward, the goal would be for the committee of the Emergency Category to oversee the creation of five new categories that they have envisioned as being needed. Once the categories have been voted in by the community and setup, the Emergency Category would then be deprecated.

The five categories are:

Infrastructure - This category is for supporting the underlying code base of the blockchain. This includes security audits, bug patches and code repository maintenance. Oversight - This category is for Worker Proposal System portal maintenance, quality control, and oversight of other categories, as well as supporting any proposals that go through direct referenda instead of the Worker Proposal System itself. While development of the Worker Proposal System is ongoing, these essential duties are handled out of the Emergency Committee. Community - This category supports the resources and spaces that bring people together. This includes meetups, educational content and platforms, public relations, lawyers, advocates and lobbyists. Development - This category is for supporting developers and ideas. This includes support for decentralized applications and applications that may be necessary for underserved minorities. Miscellaneous - This category is for any and all projects that would not fit directly under the other established categories.

Overseeing the Rebuilding

The nature of the Emergency Category is to exist only until the new categories are set up.

Their role will be to organize a competition for multiple teams to come forward with different ideas of governance structures that they believe may best serve the different categories.

The End Goal

Each Category would be allocated a percentage of the funds within `eosio.wps`. This would ensure that no Category can have an oversized impact on the Worker Proposal System itself, and would also limit the amount of abuse possible by a group of bad actors.

Referendum

To have a system put in place, it will need to put up for referendum. That means that it will need to meet these three criteria:

15% of all tokens will need to be participating in the vote There will need to be at least 10% more ‘Yes’ votes than ‘No’ votes The above two thresholds will need to be maintained for 30 consecutive days within a period of 120 days after the proposal goes live

We hope to see as many users of EOS as possible come out and cast their vote for or against this proposal once it has been put forward. It will also be very important to be active and vocal about why you voted for it or against it. If you have any questions, join in with the conversation in the Worker Proposal System Telegram group.

To watch a video interview that was done on this subject, please go to this blog post as well.