How DAO users can truly control their voting rights
Aelf proposed a solution that gives the control of the voting rights back to users by classifying token permissions.
As of today, there are still few complete businesses. In addition to mining and building trading platforms, it is difficult to create a complete business model. Moreover, various trading platforms have gradually grown into enterprises with comprehensive products in the blockchain industry, including wallets, nodes, lending, mining pools, etc.
At the same time, cloud services can reduce the cost of building small exchanges, but they can also lead to big trading platforms monopolizing data. For example, some Internet companies provide free cloud services in order to collect more valuable data.
Currently, Ethereum, which has the richest DeFi ecosystem, is gradually upgrading to V2.0, and its consensus protocol will also be upgraded to PoS. Governance voting can be regarded as the most important feature in the PoS ecosystem.
This year, Yearn.Finance rose to sudden prominence. But due to the governance problem, its community members initiated a hard fork, resulting in YFII. Another DeFi project, YAM, had a unfixable rebase function error. The founding team apologized for the error and announced a ‘Migration Plan’, which will turn the project over to the community.
For a while, governance voting became all the rage. However, the increasingly bigger trading platforms have been criticized by users in governance voting. Is there a proper solution to handling the relationship between the trading platform and governance voting?
What will we lose when trading platforms monopolize the blockchain industry?
In June 2018, during the BP node election before the EOS mainnet launch, node voting began to have a crisis of confidence between token holders and the trading platform. it is widely believed that the top 20 holders of trading platform wallets held about 40% of all the EOS in circulation.
Since then, many trading platforms have enabled the “User Authorization” interface. EOS holders can authorize the token voting rights to the trading platform, who will vote on behalf of the users. The rule caused a backlash from users, forcing these trading platforms to change the rule immediately so that EOS holders could vote on their preferred BP nodes.
After the EOS BP node votes, whether the trading platform has the token voting right has been occasionally discussed, but fewhave noticed it.
Two years later, Justin Sun, founder of TRON, made a commercial acquisition of Steemit, a decentralized social networking platform. After the acquisition was announced, the Steemit community launched a soft fork to resist the project being controlled by TRON. However, Justin Sun voted with the support of trading platforms such as Binance, Huobi and Poloniex to prevent a soft fork.
After being questioned by users, Binance and Huobi said that they would no longer interfere in the voting of the Steemit community. However, hkdev 404 of the Steem community again reveived votes from Huobi accounts. It is said that nearly 40 million votes were cast during the incident, accounting for about 10% of the total circulation of STEEM tokens.
There is no doubt that when the trading platform monopolizes the industry, we will lose our voting right.
How do we defend our voting rights
The fact that the ownership of the tokens belongs to the holders is indisputable, but what about the voting rights of the tokens deposited on the trading platform? How can we defend our voting rights after trading platforms have monopolized the industry?
Trading Platform Model
Traditional centralized trading platforms will assign to each user a separate deposit address. After depositing, the depositedamount will be added into the cold wallet and hot wallet. When users want to withdraw their tokens, the trading platform will transfer the tokens out of the hot wallet. If there is insufficient balance in the hot wallet, then the tokens will be transferred from the cold wallet to the hot wallet, and then be withdrawn.
Under the traditional centralized trading platform model, once users transfer their tokens into a trading platform, it means thetoken ownership (including voting rights) is also transferred to that trading platform.
The aelf solution: classify token permissions and claim back voting rights
For the issue of “voting rights” between token holders and centralized trading platforms, aelf, a decentralized cloud computing blockchain network, has proposed a solution: to establish an aelf Centre Asset Management Contract on the chain. The contract can limit the funds entering the exchange and define different permissions to control the assets.
The main feature of the aelf Centre Asset Management Contract is to create the “Main Virtual Address of the Trading Platform”.
Each exchange has a main virtual address, which can only be used for transfer operation, but not for voting, trading and other operations. As a result, the exchange cannot misappropriate users’ assets for voting. At the same time, the assets of the primary virtual address are publicly available on the chain, which makes it more difficult for the exchange to misappropriate assets.
At the same time, the aelf Centre Asset Management Contract also has the function of “address definition”. The exchange can open different permissions to different addresses, such as opening different permissions according to the amount, transactions exceeding a certain amount can only be given the greenlight by using multiple signatures, and the assets can be frozen through the contract when the assets of the trading platform are stolen, etc.
For the users of the trading platform, the access of the trading platform to the aelf Center Asset Management Contract function will not undermine user experience. The virtual system address of the aelf Center Asset Management Contract will assign a virtual address to each user, which offers the same user experience as the traditional mode.
For the trading platform, each deposit address constructed by the virtual address system is generated by the algorithm and does not need to be carried out on the blockchain. This means that the trading platform does not need to manage a large number of private keys, and there is no risk that the private keys will be lost.
On the most important “voting rights” issue, the aelf Center Asset Management Contract will assign to each user a separate virtual address for voting:
Voting address = Hash (Exchange Main Address + Token + “VOTE”)
Voting process: the tokens are transferred from the main virtual address of the exchange to the special “voting address” for voting, and are then voted. After voting, the tokens are withdrawn from the voting address back to the main virtual address.
We can see that the aelf Centre Asset Management Contract proposed by aelf can improve the efficiency of the trading platform without affecting user experience. In addition, it solves the problem that users would lose their voting rights.
According to the data on Crypto Mode, the market value of PoS tokens has exceeded $33 billion without counting Ethereum. In the field of crypto, it is the biggest ecosystem next to Bitcoin. The most important function of PoS is vote staking. faced with bigtrading platforms, if the status quo continues, retail investors will gradually lose their “voting rights” that belong to them.
The emergence of DAO offers an alternative to trading platforms who misappropriate users’ tokens, but it still can not change this situation. Of course, DAO will not die out. Small communities will still use DAO for community governance. The idea behind the design of aelf is to start from the underlying trading platform and solve this issue at the source. Whether the solution can work still takes time. However, as a member of the crypto industry, we should understand the importance of “voting rights”, and cannot allow the exchange to seize our rights at will.
Recently, aelf has also announced its DeFi plan, which includes a new blockchain 3.0 project with a large number of new technical features, such as cross chain function, virtual address and cloud services. Aelf also proposed a set of interoperability solutions with ERC-20 tokens. It can directly access the ETH ecosystem, allow ETH-based applications and wallets to directly access it, and maintain the interoperability with ETH. And aelf will provide a high-performance smart contract operation platform and cloud services that can support cross chain interaction. Users on major cloud servers can easily run aelf’s services and adjust the scale of cloud according to their own business needs.
The implementation of a slew of tools, cloud services and interoperability solutions developed by aelf means that centralized transactions can be directly connected to the aelf network, realizing one-click adaptation to the DeFi ecosystem. With aelf, CeFi and DeFi are able to learn from and complement each other.
