At Integritee, we believe in an ethos of decentralization — both in terms of the technical operation of our network and its governance. Last week, we took two important steps towards this goal by introducing coin voting and removing the SUDO pallet on our Kusama parachain.
Background — Governance in the DotSama Ecosystem
Governance and voting mechanisms are key features of the “DotSama” ecosystem, a collective term used to describe the Polkadot and Kusama networks. On each of the networks, token holders have the right to elect the governing council and propose and vote on referendums.
These governance processes strive to strike a balance between practicality and inclusiveness. Passive token holders are represented by the council while referendums provide a simple and inclusive vehicle for a more direct form of governance. While the council has the power to propose and vet ideas, all changes to the protocol must be ratified by a public referendum.
Voting is stake-weighted, meaning that a voter’s preference is given more or less weight depending on the number of tokens and the length of time they are willing to bond. Collectively, these governance mechanisms provide a way for the network to evolve gradually with the consent of stakeholders.
Towards the Decentralization of Integritee
For Integritee, it has always been our aim to work towards decentralization, both by distributing the TEER token as widely as possible and by introducing coin voting procedures.
Last week, runtime update V22 was released on our Kusama parachain. From now on, all changes to the parachain will require the approval of TEER token holders through coin voting. TEER holders can participate in the governance of Integritee by proposing and voting on referendums.
Voting on Referendums and Proposals
TEER holders will now be able to propose and vote on changes and enhancements to the Integritee network on Kusama. This will work the same way as voting for proposals and referendums on the main Kusama network, but you will use TEER rather than KSM to cast your vote. As a TEER holder, you can view and participate in active referendums and proposals on our polkadot.js page.
To gain a more detailed understanding of how referendums work on Kusama, check out this video:
SUDO has been removed from our parachain
In another important step towards decentralization, Integritee’s SUDO pallet has now been removed. The SUDO pallet, which granted superuser privileges to the Integritee team during the initial setup phase of our parachain, is no longer required. The decision to remove SUDO was the first key vote decided by TEER holders. The vote was conducted last week and ended shortly after 10 am on Wednesday, May 25.
Overall, the update to runtime V22 on block 285,145 is an important milestone on the road to full decentralization of the Integritee Network. You can view the code of our v1.5.26 release on GitHub. In addition, you can deterministically reproduce the code hash with srtool.
Next: Decentralization of the Integritee Network collators
Collators are full nodes on both a parachain and the Relay Chain. They collect parachain transactions and produce state transition proofs for the validators on the Relay Chain. They can also send and receive messages from other parachains using XCMP.
The aim is to decentralize the collator set and spread it across different reliable and independent parties, to fully decentralize the operation of the Integritee Network parachain.
For the all latest updates on proposals and referendums on our Kusama parachain, make sure to subscribe to our Telegram, LinkedIn, and Twitter channels. To inspect our code and be notified of upgrades, follow us on GitHub.