Why Polkadot’s new governance system is a game-changer

• Polkadot’s new governance system removed first-class citizens like the Polkadot Council and the Technical Committee.
• The community could vote on multiple proposals simultaneously under the new system.

In an attempt to bring greater decentralization and inclusivity, multichain protocol Polkadot [DOT] announced the launch of Polkadot OpenGov, an open governance platform.

Read Polkadot’s [DOT] Price Prediction 2023-24

The endeavor, meant to give complete control of the network to DOT holders, was launched after underdoing six months of testing on Kusama. The Kusama blockchain is a part of the Polkadot ecosystem. They are used for trying out new features before being released on the mainnet.

1/ 🎉 Polkadot OpenGov, the pinnacle of governance systems in Web3, has officially arrived! Welcome to the new era of fully autonomous, transparent, & efficient decision-making where the entire process is handed over to the DOT community. 🌐 pic.twitter.com/zli6Vln7Dt

— Polkadot (@Polkadot) June 15, 2023

New era of autonomous governance

The new governance model removed first-class citizens like the Polkadot Council, which previously had prioritized voting rights, and the Technical Committee, which had the power to fast-track existing proposals. This enabled all community members to decide on matters of importance through a referendum.

An expert body called the Polkadot fellowship replaced the first-class citizens. Notably, the fellowship would provide technical expertise and guidance to identify critical issues and contribute to the overall improvement of the network. However, the body doesn’t possess any hard power in governance.

Polkadot OpenGov also strives to make the governance faster by introducing multiple parallel referenda tracks. This meant that the community could vote on multiple proposals simultaneously. In the previous setup, only one referendum could be executed at a time, which ran into several days for confirmation.

According to Polkadot, the efforts paid off after Kusama witnessed a four-fold rise in the number of proposals submitted compared to the same period last year.

Tracking development activity

Polkadot remains one of crypto’s largest developer ecosystems and its full-time developer count at the time of writing was 169 as per Token Terminal, third-largest among layer-1 (LI) networks. The total number of commits to the projects’s GitHub repositories was 78.

Source: Token Terminal

Realistic or not, here’s DOT market cap in BTC’s terms

DOT in the red

Unfortunately, the news of the new governance model couldn’t resuscitate an ailing DOT. The token, which recorded double-digit weekly and monthly losses, exchanged hands at $4.32 at press time, according to Santiment.

The market sentiment for the coin trended in the negative zone as investors shied away from making bullish bets. It remains to be seen how the coin will fare in the days to come.

Source: Santiment