What does a Referendum even mean?

A referendum is the submission of a proposal to direct vote of the people, in this case, the token holders on the EOS Mainnet. With any Referendum that’s on the horizon, it usually means a potentially big change or set of changes are up for voting on rules or processes that have been in place for a length of time.

The EOS Referendum

The Referendum Contract is a smart contract based on Referendum voting on the EOS mainnet. The smart contract allows EOS token holders to vote upon a change to the Constitution or operation of the EOS mainnet. It’s a substantial move in any area usually, also substantial for EOS. Referendums aren’t common due to the significant factors involved. For say, with the EOS current Constitution it could have potential flips if there is a lobbied push on some things that people would like to see changed.

The importance of the process is a priority, for everyday users to developers all the way through to Block Producers. Voting participation levels will be greatly increased as Referendum voting is taken to a level of higher seriousness. Remember ALL voting should be considered as having a serious & understanding mindset. The referendum is the “be-all” of voting as it’s the main Governed body that upholds the current system. For the change to be had is the change to affect the future.

How Will Voting Work?

As extracted straight from the Constitution, Article XI — Amending

“This Constitution and its subordinate documents shall not be amended except by a vote of the token holders with no less than 15% vote participation among tokens and no fewer than 10% more Yes than No votes, sustained for 30 continuous days within a 120-day period.”

Voting will cost around 281 bytes of RAM and you can only vote with EOS that is staked for CPU or Bandwidth. As stated there must be 15% of votes or 150 million EOS tokens voted. This is quite a substantial number of votes and as we remember when the mainnet launched, it can take time to be achieved. This is why it is fundamentally important that proposals are easy to locate and conveyed to the community for their contribution. After a proposal is approved it will go to block producers for implementation. 15/21 Block Producers must agree to pass the proposal for it be get implemented.

Important First Proposals up for Referendum

There is already a growing list of extremely important proposals that are queuing up for a referendum. Some of which are:

Ratification of the EOS Constitution

This is by far the most important proposal that needs to be addressed via Referendum. The initial constitution that mainent launched with was by design an interim constitution to seed the launch. It needs to be ratified and built up via the community and this can only be achieved via a referendum vote on constitution proposals that are currently being worked on by community-driven groups spearheaded by the EOS Alliance 12 week Constitution Referendum series.

Workers Proposal System

There has been much debate around the worker’s proposal system whether or not the tokens should be burnt, reduced or left as is. This type of decision can only be decided on by a referendum vote. There are a number of Block Producers and interested parties currently working on a Referendum proposal for the WPS savings account.

REX proposal

Dan Larimer himself put forward a proposal for renting network resources to lower capital costs for resource consumption for developers and users. This proposal introduces the REX token used a mechanism to for EOS token holders to lease their EOS in exchange for REX tokens. REX tokens will generate fees and have its own market valuation of which RAM fees and Name Auction revenue is also fed to. This proposal will need to go to a referendum vote to be brought into action.

As we can see, there are a number of proposals that are going to fundamentally improve and grow the network as a whole. But the cornerstone to all these continuous improvements by the community is the Referendum voting tool.

All in One Voting Portal

Introducing EOSvotes

EOSvotes.io is a comprehensive and user friendly platform that is designed to be an all in one portal for voting on EOS. As you know, we need to achieve 15% or 150 million tokens staked for voting on a Referendum proposal to bring it to life. To achieve this, we need to see mass adoption of the Referendum voting tool. We believe the key to achieving this is by creating a non-branded voting portal similar to EOSportal.io which was used to kickstart the mainnet launch. The problem we see with branded tools is that they don’t get fully distributed to the entire community due to voting bias. With a non-branded platform there is no voting bias and it can be freely shared to all.

Who Should we Thank?

There are a number of BPs currently working on the Referendum smart contract and EOSvotes portal. A huge thank you to:

EOS Canada for their contribution in developing out the backend of eosio.forum which is making this become a reality.
EOS Nation for their leadership on the project and development in the vote tally and other much needed features.
EOS Tribe for their hard work in leading the Eosvotes.io initiative and designing the UI / UX of the platform.
Greymass for their guidance and contribution to the development on all levels.

Our Contribution and Update

Although we came a little late to the party, we knew that it is extremely important to get this feature into the hands of as many users as possible. With our experience in developing Eostoolkit.io we thought that we would pitch in and rather than focus on our own tool integration, put the community first and build out the non-branded EOSvotes.io portal.

We are happy to update the community that we have successfully:

• Integrated Scatter signing to the EOSvotes portal UI
• Added live user ‘yes’ or ‘no’ voting to referendum proposals
• Live staked token vote weight display on proposal voting

To Do:

• Proposal Search and Filtering — Popularity, Age, Status, Title
• Proposal expiry and passing date

We are getting close to having a referendum contract voters! We ask that you do your part and spread the message of the importance of this tool for the EOS Blockchain. Its up to us as a community to ensure we have as much participation as possible. Thank you from us all.