Governance

The Core DAO

The Core team is charged with overseeing the network through their control of the DAO until such time as it can fully decentralize. Their responsibilities include (but are not limited to) altering the number of validators, regulating governance parameters, and setting the percentage of block rewards and transaction fees that are burned.

The DAO’s membership will continue to expand, and once sufficient decentralization arrives, early CORE holders will be tasked with maintaining a community that believes in the Core mission and the sustainability of the network. Core is not limited to any particular vision or ideology; it’s a crypto melting pot united by a simple goal: building a secure, scalable, and decentralized digital currency for an internet based on freedom, transparency, and self-sovereignty.

All are welcome to join us.

Progressive Decentralization

Core’s decentralization is not limited to the consensus level – as time passes, governance of the entire Core network will gradually become more decentralized. Here, at the beginning, limits on decentralization are necessary to get the Core chain off the ground and establish product-market fit. But as the network expands, the Core DAO will increasingly lean on community participation [Wal], and the broader CORE community will gain control of all governance functions, including management of the CORE Treasury.

Challenges

Fully decentralized governance is very difficult to implement in practice because of the many ways in which such networks can be attacked [Butb]. Until the Core chain is mature, DAOs building on top of the Core are at risk of an arbitrary Core fork overriding their governance. For the Core DAO to be successful, trust and community building are essential at the beginning of the chain’s lifecycle.

Objectives

At the outset of this project, the network maintenance objectives are simple:

1. Provide a phased path towards decentralization;

2. Minimize risk to DAOs forming on top of Core;

Decentralization Phases

The broad plan is to progressively decentralize the governance of the Core DAO through three stages of development:

1. At present, Core operates via off-chain governance, in which resolutions will be passed when a majority of DAO voters are in agreement;

2. The next stage will be limited on-chain governance, in which:

   1. a fixed set of parameters, like the expansion of the active validator set, can be changed with on-chain voting;

   2. adding and subtracting parameters will be at the sole discretion of the DAO voters, through Core Improvement Proposals (CIP);

   3. there will likely be time delays to discourage vote buying and similar attacks;

3. The final stage will be full on-chain governance, in which the community will be fully in charge, and steer the network into the future;