Introducing the Axie Governance Portal!
Join us and give input on AIP-001 as we move closer towards our vision of progressive decentralization for Axie Infinity!
Key Points
Today marks the birthday of Axie governance and the Axie Score. Every Lunacian can now participate in the governance of our digital nation through the alpha Axie Governance Portal. This is a small yet significant step for Axie and gaming. Its full impact will only be understood over time.
The Axie Score is a point system that reflects a community member's contributions to Axie based on specific metrics. If you have suggestions to improve this early prototype of the Axie Score, share your feedback with us or join the Contributor Program to get involved!
The Axie Governance Portal is where community members cast votes. Connect your Ronin Wallet, stake AXS within the portal, and select a topic to cast a vote. We’ll determine each Lunacian’s voting power using a combination of factors described in more detail below. If you have suggestions to improve this early alpha prototype of the Axie Score, share your feedback with us or join the Contributor Program to get involved!
Cast your first vote in the alpha Axie Governance Portal to approve a key upgrade the will enable more robust delegation of Axie assets. More details on AIP-001 below!
A voting power snapshot will take place at 1am UTC on the May 20th. Voting will then open for AIP-001 at 7am UTC on May 20th! You’ll have 7 days to cast your vote, and at the end of the voting period, you’ll be able to check in and see the final results.
A quick note from The Founders
Today marks the birthday of Axie governance and the Axie Score. Many of us once felt we were born too late for a revolution. With the rise of the Axie digital nation, that regret is fading by the day.
This has been a long time coming. Progress has often felt slow, but when we look at web3 gaming, it's clear Axie leads in creating meaningful and meritocratic governance at scale.
This is just the first version of the Axie Score and the Axie Governance Portal, and they need improvement. Tell us what works and what doesn't.
We’re proud of this community, and we’re grateful for the Town Builders, the Contributors, the smart contract upgrade committee, and our fellow Axie Score committee members.
This is a small yet significant step for Axie and gaming. Its full impact will only be understood over time.
Background
Since the beginning of Axie Infinity, we’ve had a big idea: together, we can build and improve an immersive gaming world within Lunacia. But making this idea a reality means getting everyone involved and doing some serious planning together. In the past, we’ve discussed our vision of progressive decentralization, and how we thought Axie Governance was foundational to this.
Over the past few months, we've been working on building up community support and agreement through something called the Contributor Program. It's grown and gotten more advanced over time. We’ve now reached the place where we can start putting some of the work of the Contributor Program into action.
Introducing the Axie Score
A consistent underpinning of our vision for community governance is the Axie Score. What exactly is Axie Score? It is a point system that reflects a community member's contributions. In short, the more a community member adds value to Axie Infinity, the higher their Axie Score.
How we calculate the Axie Score will evolve over time, but it’s designed to capture a community member's Axie resume. How can Axie Score be used? There are many potential use cases. For the present test, Axie Score will be tested as a modifier of a community member's staked AXS to compute a total voting power for voting matters!
Since introducing this concept, there have been ongoing debates within the community around how to compute the Score. Most commonly, community members debate what specific types of contributions should be included, what is the relative value of a contribution compared to the others, and how will that value be measured over time as the ecosystem grows? We believe such questions are difficult to answer in the abstract, and given the importance of the Axie Score to successful governance, we ran the risk of the Axie Score falling into a community “analysis paralysis.”
In response, the Axie Infinity Town Builders in collaboration with Sky Mavis formed an inaugural committee to work through these issues, comprised of leaders from the Axie Infinity community alongside senior members of Sky Mavis: Kaladin, Freak, Baronar, Kyroh, Daryl, Trung, Jihoz, and Shade.
"Axie Score is nearly upon us. Its roots are sound and planted the right way: through the joint efforts of Sky Mavis and the Axie Community. The journey is just beginning and, traveled together, we will go far." - Baronar
The early consensus of this committee is that we should arrive at the Axie Score through ongoing experimentation over time, in strong collaboration with the community. Therefore, the committee’s focus was to quickly create a v0.001 version of the Score, share the early pre-release design with the overall community, and use it practically as soon as it’s feasible to stoke community awareness and engagement.
The first pre-release version of the Axie Score design makes a few starting assumptions:
There are four primary contribution categories:
In-game performance: to what extent does an individual play and contribute to the ongoing improvement of games within the ecosystem? We’ve introduced In-Game Performance Badges in App.Axie to reflect these contributions:
Contributions to the Treasury: what activities does a community member perform that add revenue to the Axie Community Treasury (ie, Axie part evolution, releasing Axies, etc)?
Community Contributions: what level of participation does an individual participate and add value to the overall community?
Axie NFT Holdings: what diversity of Lunacian assets does an individual own and hold (Axies, Land, etc)?
Individual measures of contribution within each of these categories are represented as Axie badges. Each of those badges will be assigned a corresponding value. Therefore, for a given category, an individual’s score will be the sum of the corresponding values for all earned badges.
The four primary starting contribution categories have equal relative weight to one another. Therefore, the total Axie Score is the sum of all four contribution category scores.
While these are the starting assumptions for the first release, the committee prioritized getting an early version out to the public over prolonged design within the committee. This initial version of Axie Score has flaws in almost every imaginable way and leaves a lot to be desired. However, the value in putting out a tangible, usable number is enormous. No matter how flawed it is, it establishes a baseline that can be used for all future community voting. Axie Score will never be finished, but now we have a starting point to work from. We’re hoping this first, imperfect version helps galvanize the community to move us more quickly towards a broadly accepted Axie Score.
"Axie Score is an idea that I’ve been excited to see become a reality for quite some time. I’m confident that after iteration and testing that it will become a cornerstone of being a Lunacian. I’m proud of Axie for finally making it a reality and I think you will be too!" - Kyroh
Your feedback and assistance in the ongoing development of the Score is important to us, and we will look to make changes based on your input. If you haven’t already done so, please join the Contributor Program, or talk to an existing Contributor to get more involved in ongoing Score development!
Introducing the Axie Governance Portal
As mentioned above, one of the more important use cases of the Axie Score is to modify an individual’s voting power. To experiment, we’re excited to introduce the community to the first release of the Axie Governance Portal! Over time, we anticipate this portal will become a central place where community members cast their votes around future important decisions within the Axie ecosystem, such as future reward allocations, governance elections, and potential investments from the Axie Community Treasury.
We’ve spent considerable time observing the Web3 space, learning from what works and hasn’t, and have taken the community’s feedback into account for this initial portal design. But, as with the Axie Score, we see this initial release as a starting prototype to prompt community engagement and input. Its design is based on a few principles we’d like to briefly review:
Stake to Vote: We want to maximize the legitimacy of all votes within the community. Therefore, we will require AXS to be staked to both affirm the commitment of a voter to the community, and to reduce voter fraud
Enhancing Democracy through a Quadratic Modifier: Typical token-based voting struggles to account for outsized influence/power from large holders. In an attempt to moderate this, we will experiment with a “quadratic modifier”, which is a variable that blunts the voting power of the largest holders of assets, and hopefully values broader community input more appropriately.
Lunacian Voting Power: A given community member’s voting power is a numeric measure, calculated based upon the amount of AXS staked, the influence of the quadratic modifier, multiplied by the Axie Score. A community member’s voting power can be applied to a given vote.
To vote within the portal, all Lunacians will first stake their AXS, connect their wallet, and select the voting topic of interest to them. You’ll be presented with your Axie Score, AXS staked, and the corresponding voting power, alongside a full description of the voting topic. We anticipate the functions of this portal to grow over time, and your feedback and input is welcome!
Introducing our First Community Vote: AIP-001
An often-requested feature amongst Axie asset holders are more robust ways to safely delegate Axie assets in ways that minimize risk to asset owners. After a review of various smart contract approaches across the crypto community, REP-015 was developed. However, implementing REP-015 requires fundamental upgrades to the Axie Smart Contract.
For the past few weeks, various representatives within the Axie community alongside SM (Owl of Moistness, Maxbrand99, freak, Duke, and dw) have reviewed the various ways to upgrade to REP-015 and have reached a consensus to perform a hard fork on Ronin. They additionally recommended an enhancement to the underlying infrastructure that enables smart contract upgrades in the future without the need for future hard forks (ERC1967). This upgrade empowers members within an Axie community-based smart contract upgrade committee (via a multi-signature method) to authorize and oversee future contract upgrades on behalf of all of us.
We therefore would like the community to assent to this committee's consensus recommendation on these two upgrades through the voting portal. Your vote helps us both validate the committees consensus and begin to expose everyone to a practical prototype of both the Axie Governance Portal and the Axie Score.
Cast Your Vote on May 20th!
The Axie Governance Portal prototype is now live! Stake your AXS between now and May 20th at 1 AM UTC to receive voting power. If you haven’t staked your AXS during this timeframe, you will not be able to cast a vote in AIP-001. After this deadline, we will perform a snapshot for all community members. Voting opens at 7 AM UTC on the 20th of May! You’ll have 7 days to cast your vote, and at the end of the voting period, you’ll be able to check in and see the final results!
FAQ
Who can create new proposals?
As of today, Sky Mavis is manually doing the technical work behind the scenes to create voting proposals. Of course, the long term vision is that over time community members will have the ability to develop proposals through the community governance process.
How are In-game Performance Badges rewarded?
For now, in-game performance badges are manually distributed based upon a player’s overall AXS earnings. The more you’ve earned, the higher the badge grade. We took a snapshot of overall AXS earnings on May 16th at 7am UTC, and distributed badges accordingly. We will take more snapshots over time.
Is the Axie Score updated real-time in the Governance Portal UI?
Yes, the Axie Score will be update in real-time until the snapshot on 20th May, 1 AM UTC. After the snapshot, the Voting Power of the user will be locked for the vote, and will not changed until voting is finished on 27th May, 7 AM UTC
Will delegated land count towards Axie Score?
Yes, delegated land will count towards the Axie Score. While there might be a few hours of delay in what is seen through the portal, the final snapshot on 20th May, 1 AM UTC will include everything.
Can my Axie Score be penalized?
As of now, no… but the community Axie Score committee alongside the Town Builders are discussing ways to account for community members that break the Axie Code of Conduct or participate in other activities that are perceived by the community as harmful to Axie Infinity.
I have more questions about how the Axie Score is calculated, or I’m having a problem using the Axie Governance Portal. Where should I go for additional details?
You’re in luck, we have a more detailed support article available to you. That support article also explores Voting Power and steps to vote.
If my AXS is staked in MetaLend, will it count towards my Voting Power?
No, AXS must be staked in the AXS staking portal on App.axie to count towards Voting Power.
Final Thoughts
We are hoping this upcoming vote and the release of the Governance Portal and the Axie Score activate our community to engage in the further design of Axie governance. If you are interested in participating more directly, and haven’t already applied, please consider joining the Contributor’s Program. Not only will it improve Lunacia, but it will also directly improve your Axie Score, as all accepted members receive a high value badge. See you there!
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