Governance Partition
The Governance Partition is not yet implemented. Support for this partition will be added in later Alphabill releases.
The Governance Partition handles voting on governance proposals and manages validators and partitions. The role of this partition is sixfold:
- On-chain governance: voting on governance proposals.
- Partition management: adding and removing new partitions.
- Validator assignment: managing validator life-cycles and reputations.
- Network capacity management: approving dynamic sharding proposals.
- Validator reward handling: unlocking "common good" rewards, staking rewards, root validator, and transaction validator rewards.
- Software certification: approving updates to transaction-system specific validation software and coordinating software updates.
Latency in this partition is not critical as the operations performed here happen over a longer timescale than actual transactions. As such, the block time can be much longer than other partitions, enabling mass participation.
As a decentralized public blockchain, Alphabill has an open validator set, free for public participation. Governance operations are automated as much as possible: for example, validator assignment into shards happens automatically, using a secure on-chain randomness beacon. Similarly, validator rewards and pay outs are calculated automatically using cryptographically authenticated data from other partitions.
On-Chain Voting
Perhaps the most challenging part of governance is on-chain voting for governance proposals: a good solution needs to balance the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders while enabling timely and efficient decision making.
Voting in Alphabill is implemented in a series of steps to ensure a smooth transition to a well-oiled governance process.
In the first release, all decisions regarding protocol changes will be implemented fully off-chain, allowing for more experimentation in developing community-wide decision processes. The Alphabill Foundation coordinates discussions and helps make sure to include opinions from as many stakeholders as possible.
In a later release, the Governance Partition will implement fully on-chain voting, using a mix of delegated token voting and a bicameral setup allowing for more diverse stakeholder participation. Eventually it can be used to vote on all matters at hand, including software updates for the Alphabill platform.