The first CIP-0094 on chain poll of the Voltaire era is now live on mainnet. The Cardano Foundation are running the poll, and results are simply indicative of views and will allow polling mechanisms and community interaction to be explored. They will not cause any changes until Voltaire governance has been developed further.
The Foundation notes on a recent blog post:
A public, permissionless blockchain such as Cardano needs a governance system that not only accepts but actually encourages participation from the entire community. In fact, even before adopting a particular system, the various members of the ecosystem should be consulted, using a mechanism to foster discussions that forecasts what will happen in the future governance system.
The Cardano Foundation knows the importance of testing mechanisms beforehand, and of doing so in a way that actively involves all members of the Cardano ecosystem. In this spirit, we launched a poll experiment for stake delegators and stake pool operators (SPOs) alike.
https://cardanofoundation.org/en/news/entering-voltaire-poll-experiment-live-on-mainnet/
The poll asks: “Which setup would you prefer to be put in place from Q3 2023 onwards?”
- Keep k at 500 and minPoolCost at 340 ada.
- Keep k at 500 and halve minPoolCost to 170 ada.
- Increase k to 1000 and keep minPoolCost at 340 ada.
- Increase k to 1000 and halve minPoolCost to 170 ada.
- I would prefer to abstain.
- None of the above.
We will vote for the first option in the poll (k=500, minPoolCost=340) for the following reasons:
- The Cardano MAV (Minimum Attack Vector) is approximately 24, which is already much higher than competitors (Bitcoin MAV ~2, Ethereum ~3).
- Increasing the total number of pools may not increase MAV, as multi pool operators are incentivised to split pools and reduce pledge.
- The cost of pool operations will increase during 2024/25 as the next bull run will increase transactions and therefore storage requirements and associated costs.
- At this early stage in Cardano’s development we believe it is better to have a set of adequately funded, professionally run pools that are able to build additional services to develop the ecosystem.
We would suggest that the parameters should be evaluated again after the next bull run and bear market when it is clearer where the ADA price has settled, and the likely requirements for network bandwidth and storage can be evaluated based on growth rates over 2 cycles.
Poll results are available on CardanoScan here.