Introducing Cartesi Governance
By: Fabiana Cecin
Tags: Cartesi, Transparency, Ctsi, Tech, Ecosystem

Blockchain projects involve diverse kinds of stakeholders, all of which live across multiple jurisdictions. Their interests have to be constantly evaluated and conciliated through well-designed communication and power-sharing processes that are accessible, effective, and compliant. To these processes, we give the name of governance.

Cartesi is a project that is contributing to the evolution of blockchain into a tool that is powerful, efficient, low-cost, fast, flexible and easy to use. At the foundation of Cartesi’s offering lies a commitment to the tenets of blockchain: decentralization and security.

We believe that to securely decentralize power in Cartesi is to secure the future of the system itself. To that end, we will build governance processes for the Cartesi ecosystem that will be progressively more decentralized, and all of them are and will be built, deployed, and operated with the utmost care. The more we decentralize Cartesi governance, the more we secure the future of the Cartesi ecosystem.

The Cartesi Improvement Proposal (CIP) System

The first phase of Cartesi governance involves the establishment of a system to standardize technical contributions and to settle matters that are mostly technical in nature, which is the standard governance issue among Open Source projects.

To that end, Cartesi has established its first formal governance system, the Cartesi Improvement Proposal (CIP) system. It is heavily derived from the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) system, with a few changes designed to turn it into a more accessible process that was inspired by Polygon’s PIP process.

The CIP fulfills the same role in the Cartesi ecosystem as other such technical standardization systems do for their own respective systems. The CIP itself is formalized in the CIP-1 document, and the project team’s commitment towards the implementation of finalized standards is communicated in CIP-2.

How to Contribute and Create CIP’s

Any member of the Cartesi community can start discussing an improvement proposal by heading over to the CIP repository and describing it in a new issue. The entire community will then be able to participate in the discussion. The only requirement is a free GitHub account.

Once the community feels the initial discussion around an improvement is sufficiently mature, one or more volunteer authors can draft a candidate CIP standards document that follows the specifications stated in the CIP-1 document and submit it in a pull request to the CIP repository. From there on, the process is similar to that of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal process. Additional discussion around the issue will take place while the CIP candidate moves through the process into acceptance. The project team will assist authors in their goal to complete the process successfully.

Looking Forward

We expect that the CIP will allow the community to influence the direction of the project and that it will assist all implementers of the ecosystem to coordinate their efforts. We also expect the CIP to be welcoming to every community member. We hope that the tech-savvy members of the community will collaborate with the larger community in the governance forum, enlightening discussions and volunteering for the shepherding of CIP’s through the acceptance process.

Technical governance processes, such as the CIP, allow any and all changes to a governed system to be openly debated by the community at large and to advance to the implementation and deployment of improvement proposals by technical merit. As the project expands and matures, we plan to develop additional governance mechanisms that will cover more of the non-technical aspects of power decentralization. For example, we are studying secure ways to allow for CTSI, that is, token holders, to govern the project through their stakes. As with all things we do, we will continue to expand our governance system towards more decentralization and security.

If you would like to talk about the Cartesi Governance System, Cartesi Improvement Proposals (CIP) or ask any questions, we have recently opened up a new channel for discussion on our Discord server. See you there!

About Cartesi

Cartesi is taking smart contracts to the next level. It is solving the urgent problem of scalability and high fees by implementing a variant of optimistic roll-ups. Most notably, Cartesi is revolutionizing smart contract programming by allowing developers to code with mainstream software stacks. Noether is Cartesi’s side-chain that’s optimized for ephemeral data, providing low-cost data availability to DApps.