Cardano Blockchain Governance Solution - The Voltaire Era
Voting & Election Integrity
Regardless of where you land on the spectrum of trust in the integrity of elections - it's a fact that a portion of the population feels that the current system of voting is subject to human error.
Even if the accuracy is 100% as it stands, it's still an issue that some people feel as though error could be > 0%. How to solve this? Don't we want trust in systems, trust in institutions?
We need to construct an online voting system with cryptography fully built in. Also, why not make the code for it open-source? You, and everyone else can go look at it for themselves. The PEOPLE of which the voting system serves can audit it themselves.
That's putting it simply, obviously there would need to be a lot of work done.
What's really exciting is that this is being worked on by really smart people as this article is being written - let's take a look at The voltaire era of Cardano.
The Voltaire Era - Cardano
For those unfamiliar - Cardano is a unique crypto project that gets a lot of love from some and a lot of criticism from others. At it's core, Cardano is working to become a secure and decentralized proof-of-stake blockchain platform with a multitude of use cases - all wrapped around it's native token ADA.
What is Cardano? → HERE
The use-case that is of most interest to this article is governance which is the final piece of the Cardano roadmap.
The Voltaire era of Cardano will provide the final pieces required for the Cardano network to become a self-sustaining system. With the introduction of a voting and treasury system, network participants will be able to use their stake and voting rights to influence the future development of the network.
Further:
When both a voting and treasury system are in place, Cardano will be truly decentralized and no longer under IOHK's management. Instead, Cardano's future will be in the hands of the community, who will have everything they need to grow and evolve Cardano from the secure, decentralized basis established by IOHK.
This sounds promising for a number of reasons:
- As a participant in the network your funds (ADA tokens) are secured by open-source code, inside staking pools that are operated by the community instead of banks. Having stake in the system is equatable to citizenship which in the case of the United States is controlled by a single government entity.
- Unlike the majority of software projects, the community can vote on features/fixes (code changes) and the direction of the protocol from an app - Catalyst Voting. This is quite different from the voting mechanism of the United States where citizens vote on representatives who make decisions on behalf of constituents.
- The code is transparent to everyone, even non-participants.
We still have a while until we see the Voltaire era of Cardano.
The five eras are as follows:
- Byron
- Shelley
- Goguen
- Basho
- Voltaire
As of writing this, we're in the Goguen era - the era of smart contracts (automation of agreements). Each era ushers in critical advancements to the Cardano project.