Blockchain Proportional Governance Reconfiguration: Mitigating a Governance Oligarchy

Abstract

Blockchain governance is paramount to lead securely a large group of users towards the same decisions without disputes about the legitimacy of a blockchain instance over another. As of today, there is no efficient way of protecting this governance against an oligarchy. This paper aims to offer a new dimension to the security of blockchains by proposing a solution known as proportional governance reconfiguration. This solution mitigates the formation of an oligarchy by (1) electing governors proportionally using a proportional multi-winner election protocol (2) reconfiguring the governance automatically and periodically. The proportional governance reconfiguration relies on a Solidity based implementation making it compatible and usable in many smart contract supported blockchains. We prove our solution solves the proportional governance problem and we evaluate our solution on two smart contract supporting blockchains Ethereum-PoA and Smart Redbelly Blockchain. Our results indicate that our proportional governance can elect 200 governors within 6–12 minutes when 1000 voters from 5 continents vote for 500 candidates.