DeFiChain’s hard fork goes live with on–chain governance and token consortium framework

Bitcoin network-based blockchain DeFiChain has officially activated the much-anticipated Grand Central hard fork on its network at 01 AM EST on Thursday, December 8th on Block Height 2,479,000.

The go-live of the ‘Grand Central’ hard fork is a major milestone as it brings on-chain governance and a new token consortium framework to DeFiChain.

Hard fork addresses product debt ahead of DeFiChain growth in 2023

The Grand Central hard fork is one of the biggest and most monumental updates for DeFiChain in 2022. It also addresses some of the long-awaited product debt and prepares the DeFiChain community for anticipated growth in 2023. The hard fork marks the rollout of four main features:

• On-chain governance
• Token consortium framework
• Support for masternode parameter updates (owner, operator, reward address)
• Pool commission and reward fixes

U-Zyn Chua, Co-Founder of DeFiChain, said: “Grand Central marks a major step in DeFiChain’s governance structure since it is implementing on-chain governance. This makes the voting processes perfectly transparent, easier and strengthens the governance structure of DeFiChain. A major step for the whole ecosystem.”

DeFiChain goes into detail about on-chain governance and the new token consortium framework featured in the hard fork.

On-chain governance
To make changes in the DeFiChain ecosystem, community members can submit three types of proposals to be voted on by masternode owners:

Community development fund request proposal (also known as Community Fund Proposal; CFP)
Vote of confidence (also known as DeFiChain Improvement Proposal; DFIP)
Block reward reallocation proposal

Currently, the process of creating a proposal and voting is largely done off-chain. With On-Chain Governance (OCG), any proposal which requires voting by community can be conducted directly on the blockchain. It will strengthen DeFiChain’s governance structure and ensure that there is complete transparency in the entire voting process for the DeFiChain community.

The voting results will now be available real-time on a dashboard on defiscan.live, which makes tracking the results much easier. For masternode owners, they will be able to generate a script to vote for each proposal via the dashboard, reducing the effort required for voting. Overall, this would result in higher levels of participation in the voting of proposals.

DeFiChain Consortium
In DeFiChain, tokenized digital assets are meant to be backed 1:1 by the actual asset in its respective ecosystem (e.g. one dBTC being backed by one BTC). However, this backing is currently not enforceable via the blockchain. The DeFiChain Consortium will give a proper structure to the backing of dAssets to ensure that all digital assets are backed.

Members of the Consortium (e.g Cake DeFi) will have their own dedicated key for the minting and burning of tokenized digital assets. Each member is required to back any digital assets they mint, regardless of whether they are minting for themselves or on behalf of users of their platform.

The Consortium members will also be required to pledge two days worth of collateral, in DFI or DUSD, that will be locked up in a smart contract. It is required on top of the backing of the tokenized digital assets. This collateral will determine how many digital assets a member can mint each day.

This additional collateral is meant to deter members from engaging in activities that are contrary to the interests of the community, and to pay for damages in the event where a member overmints digital assets or is unable to provide backing for tokenized digital assets.

The formation of the Consortium will enhance the governance structure and transparency in the DeFiChain community. It also provides a mechanism for the community to monitor the backing of tokenized digital assets, which deters overminting.