Governance

Quadratic's sole aim is to decentralize the delivery of scientific and academic material. Therefore, it is important to also decentralize Quadratic's business structure. To achieve this goal, participants in the Quadratic ecosystem should be in control of its direction. This feature of the ecosystem can be achieved through the concept of tokenized governance.

Initial Ownership

The project's founding organization will be responsible for the initial deployment and development of the Quadratic platform as laid out in the Deliverables.

Initially, much of the infrastructure will be deployed to a TestNet blockchain for proof-of-concept and for demonstrating the functionality and features of the technologies deployed.

Once the founding organization is satisfied with the stability of the technologies, a transition to MainNet will be initiated. As part of this "production" deployment, a utility token, Quadratic, will be made available for trade. As part of this deployment, the founding organization will determine an as yet undecided amount of Quadratic tokens to be circulated into the ecosystem. There will be no cap to the circulated supply and the creation of the Quadratic tokens (known as minting) may be executed more than once dependent on the requirements of the ecosystem.

Migration to a Tokenized Governance Model

The founding organization will determine at what time the platform should be transitioned to a community-owned model. A community-owned model will utilize tokenized governance principles to propose, vote and ratify changes to the Quadratic platform.

The founding organization will migrate any on-chain functionality such as smart contracts to community ownership. These smart contracts will be configured such that changes will require some kind of consensus via a voting platform. Additionally, new smart contracts will be deployable via community consensus using various automated deployment strategies.

Off-chain systems such as Quadratic's archiving software, will not be managed via a consensus mechansim. Instead, software will be available via open source licenses and will be developed by either the founding organization or by a core group of contributors. However, it may be possible for the community to propose features which should be integrated into the off-chain software and then vote on whether the feature should be developed and deployed. Additionally, the community may wish to include in the proposal a budget for the development and the ratification of the proposal may include the creation of Quadratic tokens to fund the propsed budget.