Community building and governance

3air aims to become fully decentralized over time. As the blockchain matures, we see refined on and off-chain voting systems coupled with on-chain execution, proving that even the biggest blockchain projects can become decentralized. That is the future of organizational structures we believe in.

Many on and off-chain governance solutions are available for EVM-compatible chains like Aragon, DAOStack, Colony, Compound Governance, and others. Snapshot is one of the most popular and fully integrable with SKALE. 3air may use Snapshot for its community engagement in platform governance and possibly connect with Gnosis Safe for immediate on-chain execution.

Gnosis Safe is a trusted and popular platform for managing digital assets on Ethereum. Direct integration with SKALE is on their road map and should be available soon (Safe, 2021).

The community pool is part of our plan to decentralize 3air. 3air could regularly provide funds to the community pool. The pool may be funded with a fraction of the fees collected on platform transactions described in the token buybacks chapter. The pool may be managed through a Gnosis Safe multisig account, coupled with direct on-chain execution of voting results from Snapshot.

The community pool aims to incentivize the community to participate in the decentralization of 3air and to help develop the local social communities with funding projects that have development potential and are beneficial to the whole community.

Consequently, we hope to provide more equal opportunities to emerging regions to improve their lives. With a strong, engaging community, we can start progressing towards full decentralization of 3air.

At first, the 3air community might have a certain degree of influence over the allocation of funds within the community pool and may gain additional power with time and 3air token decentralization.

The community funds usage may be subject to voting or other opinion-gathering mechanisms. It could also be used to burn tokens and fund proposed projects if it is beneficial for the development and adoption of the 3air platform. At first, 3air could implement certain limits on the community's power. Those limits are outlined in the chapter on token burning. With time, the community might receive greater power to make decisions about funding and proposals. Until then, 3air may propose the projects that can be voted upon to prevent misuse of governance and power. Also, a specified percentage of the pool, which may be around 25% or even more, could be used to fund projects.

A 3air-selected board will receive and evaluate projects requesting funding. The project choice will be the board’s responsibility. The project choice needs to be motivated by a will to progress the local society, infrastructure, and businesses with an eye on the ESG narrative. Any selected project should not directly violate 3air’s vision, policies, and objectives.

Selected projects can present themselves to the community to win their votes. A date would be set for voting, and projects will receive funding according to their acquired votes and other decision-making mechanisms. A quadratic funding model may be applied as discussed by Vitalik Buterin. (Buterin, Vitalik Buterin, 2019)

Voting may be done through the Snapshot platform, where 3air will select a voting strategy (Snapshot, 2022) that it deems most fair.

If a token holder does not want to participate in the voting process, they may be able to delegate their voting rights to another user. Experts and leaders will arise within the community through their engagements and reputation. Such individuals could receive delegations from the general community.

Up to 10% of the community funds could be set aside to incentivize users to vote if needed. These funds may be distributed to every wallet that participated in the voting process, according to the tokens they spent to vote. It could be done automatically through an on-chain management service like Gnosis Safe.

The amount of tokens set aside for voters can be adjusted to maintain fairness and sustainability. The reward must be enough to incentivize participation without depleting the treasury of development funds. It must be clear that voting is a right and obligation to help a greater cause.

If applicable, the same process applies to voting about token burning.

Governance is a major part of the 3air platform and a major token use case. We believe it will help us build a great community, incentivize token holding and help a wider token adoption and decentralization.

Figure 15 3air governance system

Voting strategies

Usually, we consider individuals’ on-chain voting rights equal to their token holdings. That may be considered fair, but it comes with flaws and inequities, as pointed out by Vitalik Buterin (Buterin, vitalik.ca, 2021). The problems can arise from small groups of wealthy participants (“whales”) overruling the opinion of the majority of individuals. Per token voting empowers coin holders and their interests at the expense of other community members. The interest of “price-go-up” from speculative holders without any intrinsic protocol interest may therefore take precedence over community priorities such as funding projects for the general good. There is also the issue of conflicting interests when users also hold the governance tokens of other projects that may be affected by their decisions.

Hence, not everything in decentralized governance is perfect, and new systems and voting strategies are being developed. Delegation is considered to be capable of solving some of the issues, as small-time holders can delegate their voting power to community leaders they trust, and they would not need to contribute to every decision personally. Of course, vote buying may become an issue in such models.

At 3air, we follow the latest developments in decentralized governance (DeGov). We believe that reputation-based voting may be the future of DeGov combined with quadratic voting. The Orange protocol (protocol, 2021) is an excellent example. Orange protocol generates reputation reports for users and couples them with their DIDs. It combines this with a Quadratic formula considering the token holdings. In such a system, more engaged users will have more voting power than passive token holders which speculative investors usually are. There are exciting times ahead in DeGov.