Juno Network core members reflect: What insights does the governance proposal No. 16 to reduce whale assets provide for the crypto community?

Author: JakeHartnell, Core Member of Juno Network

Compiled by: Amber, Foresight News

At 12:00 AM Beijing time on March 16, the governance proposal No. 16 of the Cosmos ecosystem smart contract platform Juno Network concluded with a vote result of 40.85% in favor, 33.8% against, and 21.8% abstaining, with the supporters winning by a narrow margin in this highly anticipated governance vote.

A whale holding over 3 million JUNO (total value of $120 million) will reduce its holdings to 50,000 and transfer an equivalent amount of funds to the community treasury.

However, this time the "community" brings not just a collective celebration after "robbing the rich and distributing the land," but a debate about "governance" and "simple majority as law," which has continued from the moment the governance proposal was released until now.

One of the members of the Juno Network development team, Core1, @JakeHartnell, expressed a series of views and comments on Twitter regarding this event, which Foresight News has compiled. The core points are as follows:

As of now (March 14), over 50,000 people have participated in the voting for governance proposal No. 16, with the voting rate approaching 85% at that time (by the end of voting, this figure reached 98.45%, setting a historical high for community participation in governance voting).

We are all witnessing an event that is worthy of being "recorded in history."

Undoubtedly, we all hope to have better governance tools and experience a more reasonable governance process. But regardless of how you view proposal No. 16, this proposal (and its potential impact) should be taken seriously by everyone and seen as a wake-up call. Because the occurrence of this proposal actually means that "politics" has "invaded" the blockchain, and this will not only affect Juno but will quickly trigger imitation by other DAOs and chains with community governance designs.

For a long time, I have firmly believed in the value of community governance and that communities should have effective tools to achieve autonomy, but the reality is that many problems inevitably arise during the process of community governance. For example, how should community governance function in practice? How can we effectively avoid power abuse or malicious manipulation? … and so on.

In fact, community governance in a decentralized world can almost be seen as having "God-like" powers. Governance can achieve, but is not limited to, minting or burning tokens, enforcing redelegation, abolishing the validity of validator nodes, selecting validator nodes, rolling back, and freezing smart contracts, among other things. In this decentralized world, community governance has more "dictatorial" power than centralized institutions in the Web2 era.

We are indeed standing at the threshold of a new era, but perhaps we do not have enough understanding and preparation for the possibilities and security of this unknown world. The heated debate triggered by proposal No. 16 is a good phenomenon, but perhaps neither side, supporters nor opponents, is truly "correct."

Regarding governance, I believe an important principle is that (good governance rules) must at least ensure the feasibility of establishing, exiting, and forking a community. However, the governance tools we currently have are too primitive; we need to design better tools and systems. One important point is that we need more diverse governance solutions. Currently, most governance in the Cosmos ecosystem uses the same modules, and there are very few participants designing personalized solutions, which needs to change.

Proposal No. 16 has exposed the problems existing in the current community governance of Cosmos, which is actually a good thing. Because regardless of how you view this vote, the ongoing debate has the opportunity to allow issues to be resolved more reasonably and quickly, and a certain consensus has been reached within the Cosmos community, as this large-scale discussion is, in fact, evidence of community vitality. Here are some excellent points for reference regarding the discussion of proposal No. 16 itself.

Submitting a text proposal that has not received code support will actually have no impact, and even if the ongoing proposal No. 16 is eventually passed, the voting result of this community governance does not necessarily mean it will be enforced immediately. The community can change their minds at any time (translator's note: there has already been a community vote on "repealing proposal No. 16").

In the upcoming discussion on the Juno constitution, I will advocate that text proposals should give the community sufficient power to express their ideas and intentions, but the text proposals themselves should not be binding. The content of future governance proposals should be more thoroughly discussed and optimized before officially going on-chain; for example, submitting text proposals to @hicommonwealth for discussion before going on-chain is a good choice.

Proposal No. 16 is a bad case that was hastily initiated; people did not fully consider and prepare for this event that could have serious impacts before rashly presenting it to all community members. Therefore, I believe that many viewpoints with various attitudes are correct, and I cannot convince myself to choose one side to stand with.

Some arguments mentioned in proposal No. 16 are very "clumsy," especially regarding the part about "violating airdrop game rules." I believe the proposal itself has serious flaws. If there is a centralized institution that can directly confiscate users' received airdrop tokens without providing any compensation, then how can this behavior be considered "decentralized"?

What makes me uneasy is that this widely discussed proposal does not provide enough truly persuasive narratives and evidence; it only repeats and emphasizes a rather weak argument. Worse, the proposal falsely states that it was proposed by Core-1 (the development team of Juno Network), which is not the case. If the proposal does not have the multi-signature information from the Core-1 official team, it indicates that it is unrelated to the Core-1 team.

While I do believe that the existence of such whales may pose a threat to the normal operation of the chain, and I do not oppose certain suppression and control of whales, I am quite dissatisfied with the way the Core-1 team’s proposal was misrepresented and the quality of the proposal's content.

The most important point is that I believe these assets that may be "confiscated" should not be transferred to the community pool but should be destroyed.

In the future, every proposal should be discussed more cautiously and thoroughly, and a series of inviolable principles should be established in advance. I believe that "personal wallets are sacred and inviolable" should be regarded as a very important principle.

In any case, we should now seriously discuss how to optimize and innovate governance issues. This should not be limited to the design of the voting mechanism itself but should also include discussions on how proposals are reviewed and what the proper procedures for DAOs should look like, among other things.