RPC DAO Elections - Q1 2022

Governance
#1

Calling all Harmony RPC DAO Governor Candidates

The Harmony RPC DAO is tasked with managing the direction of the JSON RPC services which interacts directly with the Harmony blockchain. The RPCDAO will educate, direct and plan for future expansion of these services to existing web, mobile and future metaverse application builders, to be able to interact with the chain, via RPC interactions, since it’s a service to help builders and creatives bridge from web2 development to web3.

The Harmony RPC DAO Mandates

  • To onboard and incentivize Harmony node operators to run non-malicious RPC nodes; measure and reward for secure, performant and resilient operators within a trusted endpoint
  • To research and improve upon RPC node operation best-practices to help manage traffic at scale while fending off malicious activities
  • To collaborate with the Harmony Foundation’s core team as well as major node-runner ecosystems with the best practices of RPC node operations

For the first few terms of the RPC DAO will NOT operate like a traditional DAO. Given the Harmony team’s understanding and expertise of the current Harmony RPC structure, Harmony will lead the RPC DAO. As a Governor for the Harmony RPC DAO, you will work closely with the Harmony Team. The Harmony Team may assign tasks that need to be done within a timely fashion. RPC DAO, in discussions with Harmony team, can determine when the RPC DAO is able to work independently from Harmony and as a traditional DAO.

We encourage all who are interested to submit their candidacy for an elected position as a Governor of the RPC DAO. The dates regarding the election process are as follows:

Submit your Candidacy

Monday 7th February at 12am PST/8am UTC: Submit Your Candidacy — To submit your candidacy, go to Governance - Harmony Community Forum and make a new topic with the title: RPC DAO Council Q1 2022 Candidate: XXXX as the subject line (replacing “XXXX” with your name, of course). Fill out any details you believe are important for the community to know about you in order to receive their vote.

NOTE: The pool for candidates CLOSE at Midnight PST, Monday, February 21st (Midnight PST the Night Of The 21st). No candidates will be considered who enter AFTER that time. Sunday, February, 22nd at 12am PST/8am UTC: The Field is Closed — Once a candidate has submitted their candidacy to talk.harmony.one, they are free to campaign. Visit reddit, visit telegram, twitter or other social media channels.

Campaigning

The days between Monday, February, 07th and Monday, March 9th will be dedicated to conversations and communications about what you can do for the the Harmony RPC DAO and asking the members of the community to vote for you.

Elections

The election runs from 12am PST/8am UTC, Wednesday, February 23rd until Midnight PST, Wednesday, March 9th. At the end of which the new Governors will be elected into their positions. The vote will be held on Snapshot in the Governance - Harmony Community Forum .

Once the election closes at 12am PST/8am UTC on Wednesday, March 9th, we will know who our governors for the RPC DAO will be. They will be integrated into all current communications systems and start the organizing in discord channel to be provide.

Best Wishes to our Future Governors!

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#2

Candidate List:

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#3

Three candidates so far. Let me know if I missed anyone.

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#4

The RPC AMA with the Harmony DAO

The recording didn’t take so Dingos recreated the AMA!

Transcript
Q) Who is HankTheCrank? What role does she play?
A) Hank is from the Hank The Crank Validator team and is a governor on the Harmony Validator DAO. She has been tasked by the Harmony core team to organize elections for the new RPC DAO. Today, she joins the Dingo’s AMA to talk about how to apply for the DAO, how the DAO operates, the benefits of joining the DAO, whilst answering any related community submitted questions.

Q) For people who have no idea what a DAO is or what they normally do, what would you say to help clear up some confusion?
A) A DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization and the aims of a DAO is to guide a community in decision making and operations. This is in contrast to a centralized organization such as the Harmony Team themselves. DAOs have pros and cons to their structure. Because of this the RPC DAO will work differently from the generally accepted DOA.

Q) What is a Validator and an RPC?
A) Imagine you at the store and just swiped your credit card. The purchase is going to Visa where Visa server verify the transaction. Similarly, a Harmony validator verifies the transaction that you create when you mint a Dingo. An RPC on the other hand are like communication endpoints. Going back to the store analogy, the RPC would be the credit card readers. Say a reader breaks, the line of customers need move to another line or if a line is too long customers can move to a shorter line. All of this though, doesn’t affect if the Visa servers can process transactions.

Q) There has been a lot of mention that Harmony is wasting time spending resources on creating DAOs, could you give some insight to why this ideology may be wrong?
A) This is fair criticism and such a point was brought up during the RPC DAO general information meeting. Harmony has insight and knowledge about the current state of Harmony’s RPC. Just creating a RPC DAO and saying, “It is your problem now”, is not going to work. Earlier it was explained how the RPC DAO won’t function as a DAO. That is because Harmony will be leading and meeting regularly with the RPC DAO in order to quickly and efficiently develop solutions to the Harmony RPC congestion problems.

Q) What are some of the concerns that we are currently facing with the RPC issues on Harmony?
A) Harmony has been labeled the GameFi chain. It is home to one of the largest projects DeFiKingdoms, and other great projects, like Dingos. The amount of traffic all this brings is huge and that is an understatement. Also because of low transactions fees, botting is contributing to the transaction numbers. Raising Harmony transaction fees as been a temporary fix to the problem. Many think that this problem can just be simply fixed by adding more RPC servers but it is more complicated than that. Going back to the store analogy. If a store has long lines, the store just can’t build new registers and hire new cashiers on the spot. The infrastructure has to be built. The goal of forming the RPC DAO is for the Harmony community to be a part of building that infrastructure.

Q) The RPC DAO is made to find solutions to these issues, could you give us some insight on what the team aims to be?
A) Hank won’t be running for the RPC DAO so she won’t be able to say what those solutions will be. However Harmony will be allocating a sizable budget to addressing the problem. If someone in the community has ideas, please run for governor because those ideas will be needed.

Q) What are the benefits of having the RPC run by the community?
A) The end goal of Harmony is to be decentralized. While Harmony will be needing to take an active role within the RPC DAO at the beginning. The end goal is that the community will be making the decisions and not Harmony. It is better for the community to be pooling knowledge and ideas. For the longevity of Harmony, the community will need to take control and steer Harmony toward the future.

Q) Solutions to the RPC issues are not as easy as people think, however, I think it would be beneficial if you could explain why some of the options that has been thrown around by the community may not be valid? For example, cross-sharding has always been a goal for Harmony, so why has that not been implemented?
A) With new technology there are always new terms and confusion around the terms. Cross-shard transactions are available within the Harmony chrome extension wallet you can select shard 0 and send ONE to shard 1. Currently though shard 0 is the only shard that is capable of handling smart contracts. Enabling the other shards to handle smart contracts won’t improve the RPC problems. Going back to our store example, enabling the other shards to be able to do smart contracts would be like Visa increasing the number of servers on their end. That just allows Visa to process more transactions but the problem exists in the store with needing more lines and card readers. In terms of the options that the community is throwing around, well, that is the beauty of the RPC DAO. Since the RPC DAO is going to be made up of the community, their ideas and solutions can be made part of the solution.

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#5

wow, thank you for doing this!

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#6

Bumping the thread as the applications to run are due tonight.

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#7
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#8

Looks like an excellent group. :+1:

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#9

You applying too?

You should!

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#10

There were questions about this since it didn’t meet the nine governor threshold. The RPC DAO will be formed and the DAO will keep holding elections until the position are filled.

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#11

The vote is up!

https://snapshot.org/#/harmony-mainnet.eth/proposal/0x4e51760f36e580e7ae6d7f95a91ff51e5e310e9da1a0b4619cfdcb4e978a9e18

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#12

Elections have concluded.

Congrats to the new governors. The Harmony Community is looking to you guys to perform miracles. Best wishes and good luck!

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#13

As we did not fill all available governor slots (2 remaining), we are planning to hold a special election to help speed up the selection process. Those that wish to be a part of the RPC 2.0 DAO should post a brief description of themselves and their vision for the RPC 2.0 DAO in the #governance forum with the title:
RPC DAO Special Election - Candidate Name
The currently elected RPC candidates will then vote internally to add 2 more members to our board. If there are any objections to this election method, we can take the normal election approach.

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