Community Treasury Vote: Final Results
Strong Vote for Establishing a Community Treasury
TL;DR:
The official, community-verified results of the first IOTA community vote are in. The community has decided to use the more than 50 Ti unclaimed tokens to BUILD a community Treasury DAO and take ecosystem development into their own hands.
The community has spoken!
We are delighted to announce the final, community-validated results of the first global community vote in IOTA’s history.
In the vote, IOTA community members were asked to decide what should be done with unclaimed tokens in the IOTA ledger: to eliminate (or “burn”) them or to “build” by allocating them towards a DAO used to fund independent projects.
The IOTA community has overwhelmingly agreed to make use of all unclaimed tokens from IOTA’s past to build the future for the IOTA ecosystem. This decision marks a milestone in IOTA’s development and ushers in a new era of community-driven support for projects in the IOTA ecosystem.
The participation of community members in this long-awaited vote demonstrates the commitment of the IOTA ecosystem to support the building of projects. The IOTA token holders that have been the main stakeholders in this decision clearly see a community-governed treasury as an opportunity to support the growth of the network and to take part in the future development of the ecosystem.
Community-verified final results
Listed below are the detailed, validated results of the count, as collected by the community node operators that counted the votes. The full validation process of many community node operators is accessible in this GitHub pull request.
- Total votes cast for “build”: 30,820,033,631,800,548
- Percentage of “build” votes: 82.77%
- Total votes cast for “burn”: 6,414,706,069,859,334
- Percentage of “burn” votes: 17.23%
- Total votes cast in this proposal: 37,234,739,701,659,800
- Participation (number of casted votes / total possible votes): 17.21%
Key observations collected during the first vote in IOTA's history
During deliberations before the initiation of the vote, some community members expressed doubts about the chosen voting method, which was ultimately decided by the community to be based on token ownership. Specifically, they questioned whether large token holders or even exchanges could influence the vote. Observing the voting behavior of the 100 largest IOTA addresses, the following can be derived:
- The top 100 largest addresses hold a total of 1.4 Pi, representing around 56.6% of the circulating IOTA supply and potential votes.
- Only 18 of these 100 addresses participated in the vote.
- No known addresses owned by exchanges participated in the vote.
- The largest single vote came from an address holding 20Ti.
- 12 of the top 100 addresses voted for “build”, and six for “burn”.
- 74.4% of the tokens held on these 18 addresses cast a vote for “build” and 25.6% to “burn”.
- Votes of the top 100 addresses amount to 134.74TI, so around 9.4% of all tokens held in the top 100 addresses participated in the vote (compared to overall participation of 17.4%).
- This means that around 31.4% of all votes cast in the Treasury vote came from those top 100 addresses.
- If all tokens that are known to be held by exchanges, as well as the endowment in tokens held by the IOTA Foundation are excluded from the calculations, the overall participation in the vote increases to 23.16%
We believe that this data shows a lot of confidence: The overwhelming majority of the largest stakeholders are highly aligned with the values of the community.
What comes next?
This community decision is a call to action to continue the work that has gone into the Treasury governance project over the past 12 months.
Participants in the Treasury initiative, who have assembled themselves in the IOTA Discord and the several community-driven working groups and initiatives around DAOs and governance, are now empowered by the vote to move on to the next stage of the process.
- Work on creating a governance framework for an IOTA community treasury DAO will move forward and likely intensify. The first proposals for future governance in the network are already published on the IOTA governance forum. The groups and discussions are fully accessible and every community member is invited to join the weekly meetings and engage with fellow members.
- The members of the IOTA Treasury working groups are preparing proposals for possible governance structures and functionalities for the community treasury DAO over the coming months. They already decided to put up certain decisions to a vote to involve the IOTA community in this process via means of additional token-based governance votes.
If you are interested in helping shape the future of a Treasury DAO, we encourage you to get involved by joining the IOTA Discord channels or checking out the governance forum at govern.iota.org, as well as following the community-based initiative on the @iotatreasury Twitter account. As a community-driven initiative, everyone is welcome to participate.
When will the funds be released to the community?
The community-designed Treasury DAO will gain access to the unclaimed tokens once:
- IOTA smart contracts are available on the IOTA mainnet.
- The IOTA community has accepted a DAO structure design in a follow-up vote.
- The DAO has been set up.
Once these conditions are in place, IOTA node operators will release the tokens into the control of the community governance. This requires a planned and coordinated change in the ledger, assigning the tokens in question to an address controlled by the Treasury DAO. This action is taken by IOTA node operators by choosing to follow the upgraded node software version that implements the release of the tokens. This step will empower the community to decide how to further make use of these funds via the then-defined DAO decision-making process.
The IOTA Foundation congratulates the initiators and the community for bringing this important decision to a vote. The Foundation seeks digital autonomy for everyone, and therefore could not be happier to see the community organizing itself, forming initiatives, and taking action on its own behalf. We very much welcome these efforts, which closely align with the Foundations’ values, and are happy to see them followed through successfully – and of course, we welcome the final decision to further nurture the IOTA ecosystem through a community-governed Treasury DAO.
We will continue to support the community in its efforts to further decentralize its decision-making and establish overall governance structures for all networks stewarded by the IOTA Foundation. Congratulations, everyone!
