Written in conjunction with the Governance Research Institute.
In a previous Blockchain Tales article, we shared a preliminary governance model. As we executed the Nodle Chain Mainnet and continue to map out our operations, technology and other resources to match our goals noted in Nodle’s White Paper, we decided to make changes to our governance model.
The image below shows a summary of governance on the Nodle Chain.
Root Committee: Controlled by the executive team at Nodle
Technical Committee: Controlled by the engineering team at Nodle (and members of the executive team)
Finance Committee: Controlled by members of the finance and executive team of the respective entities (As Nodle expands beyond its USA office)
This is designed in a fashion that will allow the company to expand in its operations and control, and eventually completely decentralize in the future. On-Chain governance represents a completely new way to manage a company.
Upgrades Governance
The Technical Committee still holds the ability to submit upgrades to the network, however, it has lost its mandate to perform root level operations. Upgrades, or other system calls submitted by the Technical Committee, are now considered “amendments” and are executed after a 48 hour period. During this period, a second committee, the Root Committee, has the ability to veto the amendment which will effectively cancel it. We made a custom pallet for this: pallet-amendments.
The Root Committee regains the mandate lost by the Technical Committee; it also has the ability to control the members of any committee used on the chain.
We plan for the Technical Committee to represent the technical team and its changes to the networks. The Root Committee represents the business and executive team, is able to monitor the work performed, and can potentially take any actions it thinks is needed (veto an amendment, replace a committee member, submit its own system calls, etc).
Company Funds Management
In our initial model the Technical Committee also had access to the company reserve of coins, but this is no longer the case. A third committee has been formed to represent the finance team. Just like for the Technical Committee, the Root Committee controls who is or isn’t member of the Financial Committee.
We also created two more company reserves to represent the legal structure of the company. Indeed, some of the coins are not managed by the same legal entity, and we wanted to reproduce a similar system on the chain for compliance purposes.
UI and Access
In order to ease our daily operations on the chain and onboard less technical members of the team, we forked the Polkadot JS interface and added a few more tabs.
We maintain our fork in its own GitHub repository and also deployed it on a publicly facing domain so that anybody can use it to interact with our chains. It is already accessible at the address: https://nodlecode.github.io/polkadot-js-apps.
This post is part of an ongoing series explaining the inner workings of our Nodle Chain and its production variant, as well as our further efforts in this direction. Stay tuned for the next one!
Got any questions? Comment below or hit me up on here: https://twitter.com/EliottTeiss
Special thanks to the Governance Research Institute
Blockchain Tales: The Next Evolution of our Governance Model was originally published in Nodle on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
