Edgeware

Edgeware, an experimental actively-governed chain and “testnet with real value” that runs Wasm and Ethereum smart contracts. Edgeware is a recursively self-improving WebAssembly smart contract chain, and an incentivized testnet for active governance.

Edgeware is being launched with a minimal governance system. The goals are twofold: to get a working system in the hands of stakeholders, and so further work done benefits from direct, on-chain feedback. The first governance system will include identity, proposals, and a treasury:

The identity system will allow users to mirror their Github handles to Edgeware. Everyone will have a persistent identity.

The proposal system will support discussing and voting on several types of resolutions, including signaling proposals (resolutions with no binding effect), funding proposals, and network upgrades. The treasury system will accumulate tokens every time a new block is minted.

Over the long term, the evolution of the network will depend on the community members and stakeholders. To make that easier, future improvements to Edgeware will ensure that creating DAOs on the Edgeware network will be easy and practically free. It will be possible for DAOs to use a variety of decision-making processes: 1-person-1-vote, quadratic voting, futarchy, and so on.

The goal is for Edgeware to be the foundation for experiments with many different governance systems in parallel. If a new voting scheme or participation model develops a successful track record, other DAOs can choose to adopt it.

The foundation for Edgeware is Parity Substrate, a framework for creating new blockchains derived from the Polkadot project. Substrate implements nearly all the code necessary to launch a working blockchain, including libp2p networking, a WebAssembly runtime, PBFT consensus, and clients for running nodes and proof-of-stake validators. The engineering effort for creating Edgeware is thus limited to building the governance systems, creating well-tested compile toolchains for writing C/C++/Rust smart contracts that can be compiled to Ethereum WebAssembly (Ewasm), and porting over a pipeline for existing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contracts to be run on Ewasm.