June 10th, 2021 - The Algorand Foundation is excited to announce a network-wide referendum on the governance program. The Algorand blockchain supports a pure-proof-of-stake mechanism for approving new features, namely voting on consensus upgrades. We will use this mechanism to enable current Algorand network participants to vote on approval of the proposed governance program. All online Algorand accounts that are participating in consensus can vote in the referendum.
In more detail, an Algorand account will need to do the following in order to participate in the referendum:
- If you have not already, you should become an online account and run a consensus-participation node. Instructions for do-it-yourself nodes are available from the Algorand developer portal, and there are multiple third-parties that can run such nodes on your behalf.
- To vote YES in the referendum, you need to install on your node an upgrade to the Algorand software, that the Algorand Foundation will make available for that purpose. We expect to have this upgrade available for installation on June 30th, 2021.
- To vote NO in the referendum, simply continue to run your participation node without installing that software upgrade.
The referendum will pass if the upgraded version is accepted by the network on or before round 15000000 (which is expected to happen on July 14, 2021). This will happen only when nodes representing at least 90% of the online stake are upgraded to this version. The referendum will fail if the upgraded version is not accepted by the network by round 15000000.
This will be the first time, and likely the only time, that the consensus-upgrade voting mechanism is used in the context of governance of the AERP (Algorand Ecosystem Resources Pool). If the vote is passed, Governance voting will move to the mechanism described here.
If the Governance referendum is passed, the first Governance period will begin on October 1st 2021. Governance rewards, earned in this inception period, will be in addition to the existing participation rewards program that will continue to run during this timeframe. It is therefore expected that the total pool of rewards, available to Governors in the inception period who meet all the appropriate criteria, will be 131.8M Algo. For more information on the first period Governance rewards, please read here. No rewards will be earned for participation in the referendum.
For any questions related to the Governance referendum please email us at contact@algorand.foundation
