Governance Charter
Verax is an on-chain attestation registry, designed to allow dApps to issue attestations into a consolidated registry on-chain. This allows those attestations to be easily discovered, consumed, linked, and composed together with other attestations. It can be used to complement other attestation methods such as NFTs/SBTs/Verifiable Credentials etc.
Verax is developed as a collaboration between multiple teams within the ecosystem. It is developed as an open-source, community-maintained project. It is free to use for any dApps that wish to integrate with it and issue attestations.
As Verax is developed by the community, one of the goals of the project is to develop an open and transparent decision-making process, whereby important decisions involve input from all stakeholders, with conversations and voting held in a public forum. As the Verax community grows, governance will naturally evolve, and all stakeholders should have a say in this process.
Guiding Principles
Transparency
The governance system will establish a series of processes that will help to maintain transparency in how Verax is developed and how it evolves. It recognises that governance will need to evolve as the community grows. One of the core values that governance adheres to is to give all stakeholders a say in how the project develops over time. As Verax is built for use by dApps, governance should give dApps that have fully integrated with Verax a say in how it is developed.
Inclusivity
The governance system will establish a series of processes that will help to maintain transparency in how Verax is developed and how it evolves. It recognises that governance will need to evolve as the community grows. One of the core values that governance adheres to is to give all stakeholders a say in how the project develops over time. As Verax is built for use by dApps, governance should give dApps that have fully integrated with Verax a say in how it is developed. As attestation registries will likely play an important role within a network’s ecosystem, representatives of networks that Verax is deployed to will also be invited to participate in governance.
Adaptability and Evolution
The governance structure will evolve with the growth of the Verax community, and adaptability is a key principle. Other methods of voting and governance design have been explored, including proof-of-contribution, reputation weighted voting, quadratic voting, connection oriented cluster matching and Voting-Bloc Entropy. These are complex designs that will take to evolve towards, and we welcome contributions from the community in researching these governance ideas.
Commitment to Community
Verax is designed as an open source, public good. Anyone is free to fork it, deploy it on other chains, or submit an improvement proposal. The governance system aims to help coordinate these various efforts so that various instances of Verax can work as a cohesive whole. Verax also aims to provide public forums where the community can openly discuss ideas, pose questions, raise concerns and generally share their thoughts.
Responsibility
Several teams that are actively contributing to the development of the project. In the initial stages of the project, development efforts will be significant as the core infrastructure is built out. Once the core infrastructure has been developed to a sufficient standard, including the contracts, subgraphs, SDK, explorer dApp, and the various public forums, etc., the project will need to be maintained by all core contributors equally. The various responsibilities will include:
Maintenance of project code, bug fixing, upgrading dependencies, deploying new versions across networks
Implementing improvement proposals as they are decided upon (depending on the team's respective capacity).
Some moderation of community channels, and participation in discussion.
Reviewing, commenting on, and voting on improvement proposals.
Reviewing issuer onboarding requests and voting on them.
Helping to improve documentation.
Amendments to the Charter
This charter can be reviewed and amended through the improvement proposal process. Amendments can be tabled via the public forum, and can be discussed and voted on in the normal manner.
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