4. Community Memberships¶
Table of Contents
4.1. About Graphene Members¶
Graphene separates responsibilities and incentives activities that are beneficial to the network, thus acknowledging different skill sets and interested community members to have incentives to contribute in the most appropriate way.
Witnesses are paid for maintaining the back-bone of the network.
Committee members are unpaid volunteers that organize the community and propose changes to the network.
Marketers are paid in referral fees.
Workers are paid for whatever they propose and do.
GPH Holders are people holding GPH. They can cast a vote and influence the DAC’s businesses
Each of the above (except Marketers) requires users to vote for the people, proposals, and/or changes. Those with sufficient approval will be compensated.
Workers are the “catch all” group where if you have an idea for something that could improve the network, you can get “paid” by the network to do it. Organizing meet-ups, developing a new tool or feature for the community, and maintaining websites and infrastructure are all examples of things workers may do.
4.2. GPH Holders¶
In contrast to most crypto-currencies, Graphene does not claim to be a currency but rather an equity in a decentral autonomous company (DAC). As a result, the market valuation of Graphene is free floating and may be as volatile as any other equity (e.g. of traditional companies).
Every entity hold the core token (GPH) is considered a GPH Holder of the Graphene decentralized company.
Nonetheless, GPH tokens can be used as collateral in financial smart contracts such as market pegged assets and thus back every existing smartcoin such as the gpUSD.
4.3. Committees¶
Since Bitcoin struggled to reach a consensus about the size of their blocks, the people in the cryptocurrency space realized that the governance of a DAC should not be ignored. Hence, Graphene offers a tools to reach on-chain consensus about business management decisions.
The Graphene blockchain has a set of parameters available that are subject of GPH Holder approval. GPH Holders can define their preferred set of parameters and thereby create a so called committee member or alternatively vote for an existing committee member. The Graphene committee consists of several active committee members.
The Graphene ecosystem has a set of parameters available that are subject of GPH Holder approval. Initially, Graphene has the following blockchain parameters:
fee structure: fess that have to be paid by customers for individual transactions
block interval: i.e. block interval, max size of block/transaction
expiration parameters: i.e. maximum expiration interval
witness parameters: i.e. maximum amount of witnesses (block producers)
committee parameters: i.e. maximum amount of committee members
witness pay: payment for each witnesses per signed block
worker budget: available budget available for budget items (e.g. development)
Please note that the given set of parameters serves as an example and that the network’s parameters are subject to change over time.
Additionally to defining the parameters any active witness can propose a protocol or business upgrade (i.e. hard fork) which can be voted on (or against) by GPH Holders. When the total votes for the hard fork are greater than the median witness weight w then the hard fork takes effect.
4.4. Witnesses¶
In Graphene, the witnesses’ job is to collect transactions, bundle them into a block, sign the block and broadcast it to the network. They essentially are the block producers for the underlying consensus mechanism.
For each successfully constructed block, a witness is payed in shares that are taken from the limited reserves pool at a rate that is defined by the GPH Holders by means of approval voting.
4.5. Workers / Budget Items¶
Thanks to the funds stored in the reserve pool, Graphene can offer to not only pay for its own development and protocol improvement but also support and encourage growth of an ecosystem.
4.5.1. Payouts¶
A blockchain parameter (defined by GPH Holders through the committee) defines the daily available budget. No more than that can be paid at any time to all workers combined.
The daily budget is distributed as follows:
The available budget is taken out of reserves pool.
The budget items are sorted according to their approval rate (
Pro - Con) in a descending order.Starting at the worker with the highest approval rate, the requested daily pay is payed until the daily budget is depleted.
The worker with the least approval rate that was paid may receive less than the requested pay
Hence, in order to be successfully funded by the Graphene ecosystem, the GPH Holders approval for your budget item needs to be highly ranked.
Since the payments for workers from the non-liquid reserve pool result in an increased supply of GPH, these payments are vesting over a period of time defined by GPH Holders.
4.5.2. Working for Graphene¶
In order to be get paid by Graphene, a proposal containing
the date of work begin,
the date of work end,
a daily pay (denoted in GPH),
the worker’s name, and
an internet address.
has to be publish on the blockchain and approved by GPH Holders.
A worker can also choose on of the following properties:
vesting: pay to the worker’s account
refund: return the pay back to the reserve pool to be used for future projects
burn: destroys the pay thus reducing share supply, equivalent to share buy-back of a company stock.
4.5.3. Pseudo Workers¶
Three types of pseudo workers exist that are not primarily used to for salary.
4.5.3.1. Polling Workers¶
A worker proposal can be used to poll the GPH Holders for an opinion. Those workers usually have no or very small pay. Additionally, they come with a proposal, recommendation or other topic on which GPH Holders can publish a binary opinion (pro, or contra).
4.5.3.2. Refund Worker¶
This worker is used to set an approval limit for worker proposals and their payment by simply refunding his payment/salary to the reserve pool. If its amount of daily pay is as large as the daily available funds, and the worker has highest approval among all worker proposals, all funds will be returned to the reserves and no one will be payed. If, however, an other worker proposal has more votes than the refund worker, the proposal gets paid its salary, and the rest is return.