What is Constantinople?

While Rome was a great leap forward in terms of laying the groundwork for a dynamic and flexible content directory for the future, the improvements made were rather low-level, and made little difference to the activities of regular testnet participants. Constantinople, on the other hand, introduces features that will immediately impact current users, with two major changes affecting the governance and the economic structure of the platform:

  • A proposal system that strengthens the governance structure of the platform, shifting the day to day responsibility of monitoring the network and allocating resources to voters and the Council.
  • A new incentive structure, with a fiat (USD) pool backing the testnet tokens, setting up a more realistic economic system for the platform

New Proposal System

Rather than Jsgenesis setting the role parameters, hiring and firing, and running the platforms token economy through a top-down approach, Constantinople will introduce a bottom-up system where members can make proposals that the Council will vote on.

While our current system allows the council to vote on runtime upgrades, the new system will allow proposals to kick storage providers, new tokens for various reasons, setting leads for roles and more.

Fiat-Backed Token Model

Another very important change for Constantinople will be the introduction of a fiat-backed compensation system for platform actors. We hope this more dynamic compensation scheme will help to incentivize and reward community participation, and create a far more realistic economic system that will benefit the project in the long run.

You can read more about the design of this model here.

Summary and Timeline

Combined, these changes set in motion a new era of governance and "tokenomics", where all participants will have to make rational economic decisions with their tokens and time, in order to maximize their rewards.

We are aiming to release Constantinople in approximately four weeks, and will in general target shorter and more incremental releases and release cycles going forward.

Further updates will be posted when we are closer to launch, but if you would like to see how we're progressing with development of Constantinople, please take a look at our GitHub projects.

Disclaimer

All forward looking statements, estimates and commitments found in this blog post should be understood to be highly uncertain, not binding and for which no guarantees of accuracy or reliability can be provided. To the fullest extent permitted by law, in no event shall Joystream, Jsgenesis or our affiliates, or any of our directors, employees, contractors, service providers or agents have any liability whatsoever to any person for any direct or indirect loss, liability, cost, claim, expense or damage of any kind, whether in contract or in tort, including negligence, or otherwise, arising out of or related to the use of all or part of this post, or any links to third party websites.