Dear IOTA community,
As we are charting into a new world of community-governance, it is obvious that we will make mistakes along the way. With this proposal, a few mistakes were made, namely being exact in the phrasing of the proposal leaving no room for interpretations, and how to deal with such inaccuracies in retrospect. I hope that with this post we can clarify this situation and move forward from this event - hopefully smarter and better for all the future governance proposals.
While @Phylo had initially proposed to stop the current vote in this forum post, it is technically not possible to stop a running vote. The only option the IOTA Foundation would have, is to ignore the outcome of the vote, which would be against our ethos and everything we are working for. Close to 6.2% of the total IOTA supply has already been pledged to this vote with participation constantly increasing.
Therefore, the current vote in Firefly will continue as planned. This proposal will allocate a total of 20% of the new token supply to the Ecosystem Fund, effectively increasing the old Shimmer supply by 25%.
The issue some community members take is the difference of “increasing the current total supply by 20% percent”, vs. “allocating 20% of the later total supply”, which is a difference of 5% dilution of the current supply.
This difference sparked an understandable discussion amongst some community members. The IOTA Foundation acknowledges that the wording of the initial and follow-up proposal was ambiguous. At the same time, as said before, technically the vote can not be stopped and also should not be stopped by the IF.
So, here’s what we can do:
1. Anyone can Initiate a follow-up proposal to invalidate the currently running vote. Even as part of the new governance framework (which should be finalized in the coming weeks), it is foreseen that an already initiated vote can still be invalidated through a new proposal. In order for that proposal to be accepted it needs to collect a larger amount of votes in Firefly than the previous proposal. The community has not agreed on the governance framework yet, but that does not stop anyone to simply make another proposal.
2. Anyone can initiate a proposal to burn part of the Shimmer token supply. If you had interpreted the Shimmer Supply increase proposal differently, and think that a 16.66% allocation for the Ecosystem Fund is more adequate, you can initiate a community proposal to burn part of the newly minted Shimmer tokens.
3. Those who are against the current vote, can simply vote “No” in Firefly to let their voices be heard and vote against the current proposal.
Lastly, I want to highlight the fact that the community now has the opportunity to really participate in the governance of Shimmer, which is absolutely fantastic. This process does however come with certain responsibilities, which includes partaking in the discussions on the Governance Forum, the regular governance calls, and generally following the established process. As a call to action, I invite everyone to be a part of our community on Discord and help to lead the decentralized governance of IOTA. The team is currently finalizing a new governance framework which clearly defines the entire process for the future.