Akash Proposal #9, July 20, 2021
Well if you didn’t hear about proposal #9 yet, you probably live under a rock (or don’t obsessively scroll twitter). In all seriousness though, today was an extremely important day for us as a Validator, Akash, and decentralized governance as a whole.
I will detail in full below, but for those of you who want a short form update: TL;DR Chandra has decided to amend proposal #9 to support a committee driven multi-sig wallet for LARGE deployment funding requests ($10,000+). Initially, small deployment requests ($100–$1000) will be handled internally by the Akash team (as originally planned), but rather than using the community fund they will use the treasury.
Jack Zampolin initially gave constructive criticism for Proposal #9 because he believes we should use a committee structure with a multi-sig wallet in order to fund all submissions (including the small ones). We pushed back because we anticipated a large volume of submissions, and don’t believe that we have a committee capable of handling that at scale, in an efficient manner (currently). After some back and forth, we reached an agreement between all parties involved. After that the decentralized governance gods did a dance, and everyone lived happily ever after, the end (ok maybe not the last part).
The Proposal-
https://forum.akash.network/t/proposal-developer-program-and-community-fund/541/32
https://www.mintscan.io/akash/proposals/9
This proposal was created in collaboration with Akash, with the primary goal being to encourage people to deploy new applications to the Akash cloud. This was the first of many proposals we planned to create regarding the community fund for Akash Deployments. The plan was to start small with $100 to $1000 per submission, and overtime increase the funding to $10,000 and eventually $100,000.
Based on the recent Akash <> Solana hackathon (https://solana.com/solanaszn), we (Chandra Station) believed that the amount of submissions and requests would be large. And for that reason, thought it best that the Akash team be responsible for monitoring requests, accepting them, and finally, funding them. Jack Zampolin (and other community members) believed this would be infringing on the decentralized governance aspect of the network, and that it would be more appropriate to create a committee with a multi-sig wallet in order to evaluate and fund these submissions.
Discourse and Commentary- peaceful discourse, amongst dissenting opinions.
While we certainly know of Jack, we hadn’t had any relationship prior to today. We spent time carefully considering his comments, and began in a back-and-forth on twitter, with some community members involved on both sides. Jack’s main point boiled down to utilizing the decentralized tools available to us, and having successfully done something similar before (https://www.mintscan.io/cosmos/proposals/34), we respected his position.
On our side, what we were most concerned about was efficiency. To be clear, we FULLY support decentralized governance. But our main goal was to give deployers easy access to Akash for new deployments. And we felt that a multi-sig/ committee set up would slow us down, and therefore create a barrier for people interested in entering the ecosystem.
We (Jack and Chandra) mutually decided to take it private, and have a conversation one-on-one. We had a short call and worked through some ideas, and then eventually engaged other validators for their input.
The key takeaway here; DECENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE WORKS. Despite not knowing each other, or sharing the same opinion(s) — we shared an unspoken common goal: grow the Akash network. Today’s debate was a blessing in disguise. It proves that through peaceful discourse, rational thought, and communication we can truly create a community that works towards the same ends. It’s all of our responsibilities to engage with dissenting opinions, and to hear them out in a way that’s productive.
The amendment, and moving forward
Eventually, we came to an agreement. Initially small submissions ($100–$1000) will be internally managed by Akash, and funded through the Akash treasury. The next stage, larger funding submissions ($10,000+) will be managed through a committee, and funded through a multi-sig wallet managed by those committee members.
After Jack, and other validator(s) agreed to this, we approached the Akash team and they agreed as well. So in the next day or so, we plan to amend our proposal to reflect the new plan. This satisfies Jack’s desire for decentralized/ committee governance, ours for efficiency in phase 1/ small submission requests.
Moving forward, we are making a call to action for other Validators to get involved in this process. It was a pleasure to meet some of our Validator friends today, and we hope more of them reach out to get involved in the committee, or even just to say hello.
Onward and upward, #akash.
