SPS Governance First Proposal

Today, August 23rd, 2022, the initial version of the SPS governance voting system will go live within the Splinterlands game. This is an extremely exciting and important step forward in the pursuit of player-owned game experiences.

This post will both offer a short description of how the initial version of the governance voting system works, as well as act as the first "proposal" under the system to ensure that everything works properly before starting real proposals that alter how the game or token ecosystem operates.

This first proposal is more of a test proposal to gauge what percentage of the total staked SPS in the game is interested in engaging in governance proposal voting. This will help properly set initial vote thresholds for proposals going forward. So with that in mind, we ask everyone who is interested in participating in SPS governance voting to vote on this proposal on the Splinterlands website within the next few days.

In this case, it doesn't matter if you vote for or against this proposal or if it passes or fails, it is only to gauge the amount of interest in voting as a percentage of total staked SPS.

Governance System Details

For the initial version of the governance system, only the Splinterlands team will be able to submit proposals for a vote. These proposals will mostly constitute changes to the game or the SPS tokenomics that we believe will be beneficial to the overall ecosystem. Rather than us just going ahead and doing them as has been done in the past, instead the governance system will be used to allow the player community to decide whether or not the changes should be made.

In the future, the governance system will be opened up for anyone to be able to submit a proposal for a relatively small fee to prevent spam. Even in this case, it is important to understand that ultimately whether or not certain changes are implemented into the game is up to the Splinterlands company, regardless of the results of any SPS governance proposal votes.

Obviously, our goal is to build the product that our players want, but in certain cases it may not be practical or even possible for us to do certain things even if the player-base may want them.

Our long term goal is that more and more of the game code will be open-sourced over time, and more of the operation of the game and the tokens/NFTs will be turned over to the network of validator node operators (starting with the SPS token), at which point many types of proposals will be able to take effect automatically upon being approved by the community without any intervention or approval from the Splinterlands company or anyone else.

Proposal Voting

First and foremost, the content of all SPS governance proposals will be posts on the Hive blockchain (like this one). This ensures that the content of what will be voted on is always publicly available, censorship resistant, and that any changes or updates are fully transparent. This is one of the most important features that the Hive blockchain provides and it fills the exact use case we are looking for when it comes to this type of proposal system.

The unique identifier for the proposal post on Hive can then be sent to the SPS governance proposal system via a new sm_create_proposal custom JSON operation published to the Hive blockchain. This will cause the proposal to appear on the Splinterlands website (as well as any third-party websites that wish to display proposals) and allow players to cast their votes for or against it.

The "weight" of each player's vote on a proposal will be equal to the amount of staked SPS tokens in their account at the time of the vote, minus any SPS tokens currently in the unstaking process. In order for a proposal to pass, it currently requires at least 25% of all staked SPS to vote on it, and at least 75% of the staked SPS that has voted on it must vote "for" the proposal with less than 25% voting "against" it.

These thresholds are subject to change as we see how the initial voting goes, which is why we are asking everyone who is interested in participating in the governance voting system to vote on this test proposal.

Proposal votes are currently set to last for 7 days, and players may change their vote at any time during that period or re-cast their vote if they have staked more SPS since they last voted.