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Holographic consensus - SciFi in governance

“The requirement to involve a majority imposes massive transaction costs between you and achieving what in all likelihood is a relatively straightforward and rational goal.” - The sovereign individual

This is another critical component of our governance framework that allows us to remain fully on-chain while avoiding the need for a majority quorum for every decision.

Where decentralization has the Blockchain Trilemma, governance has the trilemma of decentralization, participation and efficiency. If somehow in a perfect world you had voting power equally distributed among a community of people, how would you get all those people to critically consider and participate in voting?

The answer here, likely, is that you won’t.

You don’t want to occupy the time of an entire population with a single governance decision, do you? Rather than complete involvement, we seek for efficiency while maintaining decentralization and a healthy level of participation.

The key to holographic consensus lies in the economic curation of proposals. A small predictions market economy emerges around the likely outcome of a proposal as tokens are staked on it, which increases the potential influence and seriousness of the issue by acting as a gatekeeper for voters.

Additionally, proposals that have been given a financial incentive (boosted) have fewer prerequisites to be considered successful, resulting in increased system efficiency.

The latest trend of delegated voting is another example of how to improve the efficiency of governance systems. While this enhances a DAO’s speed and decision-making, it typically sacrifices centralization and can even exacerbate the corruption issues associated with liquid token voting.

Instead of making the voting power itself be an economic incentive, with holographic consensus, the economics come from governors attention.

Stages of holographic consensus

  1. In queue: These proposals are the default state with no holographic consensus actions taken on them. The DAO automatically down-stakes each proposal with a set amount of ERC20 tokens. This means it gets none of the benefits of holographic consensus without further action. Proposals in this state can pass but only with a majority vote of 50%+

  2. Pre-boosted: This stage is the same as “In queue” but the proposal will have a countdown before it boosts.

  3. Boosted: Once a user stakes positively on a proposal enough to outweigh the negative down-stakes it can enter the boosting phase. Boosted proposals have a shorter time period and can pass so long as the votes are not negative. Votes placed during boosted period do not lock REP.

Proposals can also be “down-staked” which would take them out of their boosted status.

  1. Executed/Executable: Once a proposal is over the staked ERC20 tokens can be redeemed. This redemption includes : The original amount staked If you staked on the correct outcome then you can redeem the reward amount from the opposite side that staked against you (including the DAO bounty/down-stake)

There are more complexities to holographic consensus but this explains the basic parts.