Decentralized and Open source are arguably the most popular words in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, but unfortunately, they are in fact an illusion in many blockchain and cryptocurrency projects, not only in the technology itself but also in every aspect of management of the community of supporters and users of the cryptocurrencies and as well in the community of contributors to the technology. Unarguably, one of the major goals of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency is to create an ‘embezzlement’ free economy and a decentralized community free from third party influences and manipulations by the ‘higher-class’ individuals.

Most cryptocurrency community have struggled to accomplish this vision, majority of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects have been labeled ‘scam’ primarily due to obscure moves by the development and promotion team. While most of these projects have defeated this negative tag and have stood up as ‘genuine’, the scar still remains and the cause of the initial ‘scam’ name tag is still left untreated however people have only come to believe in these projects because the development and promotion team have successfully proved beyond doubts that they are ‘here to stay’ and not actually because they have satisfied the people’s crave for transparency in financial transactions and decision making. Many blames this misunderstanding on the claim that ‘the people wants more’.

Probably the people wants more, but, yes, they deserve even more, while the tirelessly working cryptocurrency project team members have achieved tremendous success over the years, the community behind these projects also shares a huge part of the struggle and their persistence and determination to see to the success of the projects have earned them the ‘army’ name. While the core team can be seen as the War leaders, the rest of the squad also deserves sufficient information about the pros and cons of the exercise.

Amongst the issues surrounding governance in most cryptocurrency communities are…

Obscurity in funds management

Once members of a cryptocurrency community learns about a transfer of a substantial amount of the coins they support to another wallet, probably from tweets by whalealert, many questions arises as regards the reason for such transfer and what effect if will have on the project. Regardless of how genuine the project have proved to be, the question of ‘an exit scam’ will always rise at the wake of an unexplained huge fund transfer. This have caused some level of volatility in crypto prices as the coin holders panic-sell in response to these transfer. This have affected the cryptosphere so much and have the questionable stability of crypto prices continues.

Centralized decision on employment, staff remuneration and work time

Decentralized? If yes, then the community should also have a say about who works for them and should also be part of the decision about how much these staff are paid for their services and how much work they also do for the community. This is an ideal example of decentralization and open source decision making. While many crypto projects core teams have earnestly worked towards achieving this, they still fall short at times. Hopefully more effort is made to improve on this aspect and to get the people more involved in all-round decisions making of cryptocurrency projects, this is the only way it will truly attain its tag of decentralized and The people’s currency, devoid of censorship, third party influences and centralized governance.

Limited space for contributions

Just a quick follow up to the aforementioned point, cryptocurrency projects also sets limits of the number of contributions they get from the community members, either in form of financial advice or technical advice, this have raised issues of negligence in cryptocurrency communities and more questions arise as regards the level of decentralization and how open source the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency really is, while some neglected contributions would have really been disastrous to the project, many neglected contributions would have also been greatly beneficial to the project. Rejection/negligence of advice or contributions from the community should be diplomatic and shouldn’t raise concerns about hierarchy and stratification in the community.

’Closed channels’ and stratification in Crypto communities

While closed channels enables the team to make closed door decisions and also helps to ensure organized contributions, it still doesn’t go well with the decentralized term. True decentralization comes with complete transparency especially when the decision to made concerns the whole community, this gives everyone the opportunity to decide what happens in the community as it truly concerns everyone. Though decentralization is quite different from democracy, they do share a similarity in involving the whole community members in almost every aspect of management and governance.

How we hope to improve community management with the V5 upgrade

Having studied different governance strategy used by numerous projects and also the current leadership concept of Pascal. The Pascal DAO team have developed an explicit leadership strategy which is geared towards improving the current efforts put into governing the community and managing the project via;

Rehabilitation of the key-team and allocation of specified roles to facilitate workflow: The Pascal key-team consists of members of the Pascal community who have contributed notably to the project and subsequently declared interest to joining the decision making team of the project. Hence the key-team consists of individuals who are willing to help the growth of the project by offering their opinions and contributions in areas that matters. With a notable number of individuals making up the key-team team, the DAO governance ‘Pascal Improvement Plan’, the DAO hopes to rehabilitate the key-team by allocating clearly stated positions to different (deserving) members of the key team and authorizing these selected individuals to make decisions within their jurisdiction. This will create a good division of labour and anew enhanced workflow which allows everyone perform their duty and also enables the community members know ‘who does what’ and the right individual to approach as regards any enquiries.

Democracy in decision making and ensuring majority approval before approving proposals: In a democratic society, the majority wins, this is obtainable in most community owned projects and organizations. While this have always been the norm in the Pascal community, the new improvement plan only gears its effort towards ensuring transparency in voting processes and also making sure that the plans voted on by the community is executed just the way it was proposed. The new voting PIP focuses on allocating the voting powers according to different criteria (check out the files at the enclosure), community members are required to vote accordingly and the majority vote becomes the adopted plan.

Transparent funds expenditure via easy tracking of expenses from the foundation accounts: The foundation accounts holds funds donated by miners for the improvement of the Pascal project, hence the community owns full rights to transparency on how the donated funds are spent towards the growth of the project which they support, with respect to this, the foundation accounts are always available to the rat of the community and the foundation team are always answerable to questions regarding movement of funds, destination of the ‘moved’ funds and the reason for the expenditure, while this have always been the norm, this will also continue in an enhanced fashion while the foundation remains accountable for any PASC spent from the community treasury.

How we hope to develop a sustainable contributor reward scheme

Contributors to the Pascal project includes blockchain developers, marketers and anyone putting efforts towards making the Pascal blockchain better and improving the project. Efforts deserves rewards and we are not indifferent to this, hence we strive to reward every contributor accordingly, however, with the growing number of contributors and increased pressure on the foundation funds, the DAO team have also been working on drafting a mechanism which ensure that the reward scheme can be sustained for a reasonable amount of time and also flexible enough to change with respect to the varying conditions, Via;

Pasconomy: Pasconomy is a reward scheme in which contributor proposals are passed in PASC instead of USD, before a proposal is passed, the value of the service to be delivered if calculated in PASC relative to the value of PASC at the time of passing the proposal and also the amount of funds available to the foundation. This ensures that the payments don’t vary with the value of Pascal. With the very unstable nature of cryptocurrency prices, this reward scheme ensures a stable reward system one which allows long term planning for the project and also a sustainable economy as fluctuations in cryptocurrency prizes will not affect the progress of the already approved proposals hence ensuring that the project continues it’s development amidst unbearable crypto weather.

Quarterly budget planning: Contributor rewards are deducted from the mining rewards for any block mined, with the statistics of daily blocks mined, monthly blocks mined and the blocks mined annually, the foundation is able to make a good estimate of the income per month and also per annum, with this Information, the foundation will plan its budget quarterly relative to the price of PASC and the estimated earnings over this time range. Quarterly planning helps to create a balance between price fluctuations and contributors earnings, the foundation will be compelled to increase the amount of PASC rewarded to contributor during bad cryptocurrency weather or also reduce the amount of PASC rewarded to contributors during favourable cryptocurrency weather. This makes for a scalable financial system and a flexible reward plan.

Further details of the Governance improvement proposals can be found below
PIP-0039–Temporary voting procedure

PIP-0040–Pascal governance

Join the Pascal discord channel and be part of the decisions!

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