EGL’s design was conceived for it to be fully functional on Day 1 and to allow the community to immediately control and govern the system. At launch EGL holders can vote on their desired gas limit and miners can follow the vote. Any EGL holder can, and is encouraged to, actively participate in any future development of EGL.
The EGL creators have kickstarted the process with a few resources but it’s up to the EGL holders to move these initiatives forward — the community should not rely on the creators to continue to develop the protocol or ensure its success. EGL’s success comes from it being used to vote and miners following that vote.
The resources currently available are:
- Discord group — for general questions, comments, conversation, etc.
- Forum — for deeper community discussion on larger topics
- Proposal website — to submit formal proposals to be voted on by the community; requires action by multisig to implement
- GitHub — entire codebase for EGL
- Upgrade multisig wallet — comprised of trusted members of the DeFi & Ethereum ecosystem; this 3 of 5 wallet can upgrade the voting contract
Discord, Forum & Github
Discord
Anyone can participate in Discord to have conversations, ask and answer questions, and meet each other! Discord exists to serve as a watering hole for EGL holders and fans and we hope the community continues to grow and be a vibrant place for discussion, discourse, and support. Additionally, the EGL creators do not intend to moderate the group.
Forum
Forum was created to have more structured conversations and debates about topics related to EGL. Anyone can create a topic and our thought was discussions on Forum are the precursor to proposals that ask the community for voting. As with the Discord group, the creators do not intend to moderate the group.
GitHub
The Github repository contains the code for the EGL contracts. Anyone can fork the repo and submit pull requests (PRs) with changes. PR’s will need to be reviewed by the GitHub owners before being merged.
Administration of these assets
Anyone can become a moderator, administrator and GitHub owner — in fact we encourage it! Ideally all these assets move away from the creators and to members of the community. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, get the conversation started on Discord, submit a proposal request and show the community is behind you!
Upgrade Mutli-Sig Wallet
The EGL creators have employed the use of a multisig wallet to transition EGL from development to production and further move control from the creators to the community. These initial members are trusted members of the community and represent the various stakeholders: miners, core developers, dApps, investors and traders. Moreover, 4 out of 5 of the holders are not related to or controlled by the EGL creators.
Through the proposal website the community holders may vote to confirm or replace these multisig holders. Anyone with EGLs attributed to their wallet can submit a proposal for vote on snapfish.
Replacing a multisig signer would require 3 of the 5 holders to sign a transaction that removes and replaces a signer.
Why use a multisig and not automatic code proposals and changes?
Our major concern was around bugs and exploits. Even though the contracts were audited, something could go wrong and having a multisig wallet controlling the contract allows a whitehat hacker to safely tell the multisig holders of a vulnerability that can be quickly fixed. Otherwise the vulnerability would need to be revealed through the voting process so a change could be implemented via automatic code.
Secondly, the multisig holders can act quickly. Most automatic code implementation processes require a time delay to review and vote on the code. This would give time to malicious actors to potentially exploit the situation.
EGL’s DAO
The community has been seeded with an EGL DAO of 250M EGLs. This DAO can be spent for any purpose by the EGL holders, and is intended to be used to fund development of future upgrades, security audits, code audits, etc. The voting multisig wallet controls the EGL contract, including the DAO, and requires 3 of 5 signatures for a transaction to be approved (see the governance section for more information).
Elevating Community Voices
To highlight important voices in the ETH community that may serve as an information signal of what the community’s desired gas limit ought to be, up to 50M EGLs are allocated to core devs, including client teams. We call this group EGL Signals.
These EGLs can be used to vote like any other EGL, can be locked for a duration of 1–8 weeks, and can collect Voter Rewards, with the exception that no amount of EGLs can be withdrawn after 1 year from the deployment of the EGL smart contract.
At launch roughly 20 core devs signed on to receive EGLs and each will be seeded with locked EGLs to vote with and signal to the community their individual desired gas limit. Additional core devs can only be added up to 70 days post voting contract launch and any unused EGLs will remain in the DAO. To add additional core devs requires the multisig holders to approve by a majority vote.
EGL’s Future
The introduction of EGL not only created a mechanism to influence the gas limit, but also built on the Flashbots model of making a protocol level change without a hard fork. Namely, EGL introduces a mechanism to influence key parameters in Ethereum. This use could be applied to other contexts in the future, such as:
- Discouraging reorgs
- Transaction ordering
- MEV mitigation
- Delegating voting rights
- Discouraging selfish mining
- Mining decentralization
- Transparency of node diversity
In each of these cases, EGL could be used to reveal a preference and reward another actor for following that preference. For example, the EGL community could vote that transactions ought to be ordered based on fee paid and miners could be rewarded by claiming EGLs for following such a vote.
Other examples of changes EGL holders may wish to do are: allow for delegation of the desired gas limit voting, increase or decrease the voter threshold, extend the EGL voter rewards beyond 52 weeks, etc.
It’s entirely up to the community to make such decisions and implement them.
Conclusion
EGL was built to be immediately usable and governed by its community. These initial governance mechanisms are simply to get the community started. It will be up to the EGL holders how to move EGL forward.
