Dillon Chen: Edgeware – Coordinating Distributed Communities With On-Chain Governance

Governance within any community has been a work in progress for humanity's history. The blockchain ecosystem continues to develop and offer an alternative to today's centralized powers. With this, distributed projects and technologies will need to enact clear governance to ensure viable competition with the streamlined decision-making processes present in today's institutions.

The absence of codified governance in Bitcoin may be one of its most significant traits, signaling to the world its predictability due to its inability to change drastically. New projects like Edgeware, however, hope to encode the rules of governance on-chain and ensure a transparent process for stakeholders wishing to participate.

Edgeware is a smart contract platform built on Polkadot's Substrate. Focused on developing community-owned governance tools, Edgeware is a distributed project where participants use the tools themselves to vote, delegate, and fund each other to upgrade the network. While initially developed by Commonwealth Labs, Edgeware at launch will be entirely managed by the community, which holds 90% of the tokens and resulting influence.

Topics covered in this episode:

What attracted Dillon to crypto and why he co-founded Commonwealth LabsMulti-chain governanceHow Edgeware is uniqueBuilding Edgeware on Polkadot’s SubstrateRetrospection from the soft-launch of EdgewareWhat a “lockdrop” is, and why Edgeware had oneThe issues and controversy around the Edgeware launch and lockdropThe zero-day fork of Edgeware, StraightedgeThe future of Edgeware

Episode links:

Edgeware HomepageCommonwealth HomepageRelaunch: A Clean Genesis for EdgewareEdgeware White PaperEdgeware blockchain launch gets hijacked by rival fork - DecryptEdgeware Participation StatisticsStraightedgeHey Straightedge - Conspiratus episodeEdgeware on TwitterEdgeware on DiscordEdgeware White Paper

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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/322