As many of you know, this May we had our first budget proposal submitted on the Bitcoin Green blockchain. If you’re not familiar, our budget proposal system allows masternodes to vote on redirecting up to 5% of staking rewards to a predetermined address for a predetermined time period. We want to thank all of our community members for taking the time to vote and participate in on-chain governance — one of the most exciting features of The Green Protocol. The proposal to help us fund our tech initiatives (see our roadmap for details) successfully passed 363–134, however, we had problems with the budget initiation. On top of enabling budget initiation and resolving the issue, our developers have been hard at work adding additional features and improvements to the network:

1. Budget Proposal Update

Masternode governance budget payouts have now been fixed. This update will ensure that budget proposals successfully voted on will initiate the funding mechanism in our network. The proposal budget will redirect up to 5% of future inflation to the budget pool. The block reward structure will remain unchanged, so 85% will still payout to masternodes, and 15% to stakers. Budget pool distributions occur on a monthly basis for a set period of time.

2. Decentralized Governance Mechanism

We’ve developed a proprietary feature for masternodes to vote on proposals which aren’t connected to the block reward. Currently, only proposals involving funded proposals can be submitted to the network and voted on. This new feature will allow anyone in the community to put key decisions to a vote. For example, selecting the location of a Bitcoin Green event, determining whether or not to implement a feature, prioritizing objectives–any key decision can now be decided by the community in a decentralized fashion.

3. Transaction Fees To Masternodes

In our original build for Bitcoin Green, we were burning all transaction fees. Now, transaction fees will go directly to stakers in the network. This feature will be essential for the future of our network. When block rewards taper off, transaction fees will remain a primary economic incentive for stakers to continue validating transactions and mining blocks. This will also further strengthen network security by making it prohibitively costly to spam the network with small transactions.