Vega Research

Flexible & self-governing architecture

cryptography game-theory mechanism-design

GitHub issue: #1

Description

Overview

We are designing modular architecture to allow markets high flexibility to choose their configuration and blockchain behaviour, updates to be efficiently handled on-chain, and dynamic adaption to the network and environmental factors.

Details

While the progression of a blockchain is usually well distributed among a number of validators, the factors that cover governance - setting various operational parameters, performing updates in the code or the algorithms, etc - are often far less distributed. To make things worse, many decisions cannot be voted on by the same structures the validators use - for example, validators might have an economic interest in keeping other validators out, and thus should not be responsible for membership decisions. Another issue is voting competence - some stakeholders may be in just as an investment and have little motivation to obtain all the knowledge needed for a competent vote. Other decisions that a self-governing blockchain needs to be able to make include for example

Features

Research Question: For above questions (as well as more that are still identified), propose a voting setting in which all decisions are made by voters that have both the competency and the interest to make decisions that are in the best interest of a robust and well decentralised blockchain. (It might be a good starting point to give a good definition what that actually is).