Good evening @everyone 👋

This week the team released some updates to the Governance portal. There were some bug fixes introduced in version 1.0.5 focused on text alignment issues, and in version 1.0.8 (there were a few test versions in-between) we added proposal guidelines to the draft proposal pages. This version also saw some further tweaks to proposal formatting.

And on that note, today is a very special day, for today we had the very first community proposal submitted to the governance system. A big thank you to Pod & Max for their contribution, and for the fantastic idea of an automatic lottery for active hosts!

You can read more about the proposal here:

https://governance.edge.network/proposal/7f518bdffcf0b6cdfea093448739e69a9d06b819caa433edbccbdeee256adfbb

And discuss it either in the governance portal itself or in the governance discussion thread here:

https://discord.com/channels/371989135172567051/1078718512710811778

The proposal will be open for 21 days as usual and the core team look forward with excitement to the community’s participation in this very important and meaningful initiative.

Behind the scenes, we’ve also been working on preparing the blockchain for the introduction of transaction fees. We’ve modelled a few potential ways in which this can work, but have generally settled on a very similar (though simpler) model to Ethereum. We’ll be submitting a proposal to the Governance system to ratify this approach soon.

This change is likely to come in a few phases: to begin with we’ll introduce the functionality for transaction fees to the blockchain and release this to mainnet; next we’ll upgrade all the tooling around the blockchain (the wallets, explorer, apis, libraries etc) to support transaction fees; and then finally with some notice, we’ll begin to enforce transaction fees on the network.

There are some questions around transaction fees vs fee-free transactions, but we’re leaning towards always enforcing transaction fees and these being burned by default. When this comes to node earnings payouts, we’ve always been of the opinion that we should support microtransactions — and we think we still can, by the mineable supply taking into account the transaction fees.