Proposed Telos Governance Update: Revising “regproducer” to Increase Block Producer Competitiveness and Reliability

In an effort to increase block producer competitiveness and performance on Telos, Detroit Ledger Technologies block producer is excited to announce the first in a series of proposed improvements to the Telos Blockchain Network Core Governance documents.

Regproducer Clause 7: Resignation and Removal for Inability to Perform Obligations

This proposed change is a small but powerful change that defines the penalty for failing to produce 15% or more of the assigned blocks within a rotation in the “regproducer” agreement that all block producers sign when they register on mainnet. This represents approximately 30 minutes of active block production time or approximately 2 hours of consecutive time the block producer is out of service. Unlike many of the other clauses for violations of block producer duties and acts of intentional malicious behavior, Clause 7 neglects to prescribe a penalty and was inserted into the code without much data on what the appropriate service level should be. Raising and aligning the standard will increase competition among block producers and result in greater block producer rank mobility because users must be voting for register producers to stake additional tokens in REX or perform. This means users are also disincentivized further from voting for unreliable block producers as they will lose out on additional staking yield.

The current penalty is a 2 hour violation for the initial offense, raised by a power of two per offense. For example, a second violation is 4 hours, a third violation is 8 hours, a fourth is 16 hours, and so on. Under this system, the initial penalties do not reflect the appropriate severity for poor performance that has network-wide implications. Penalties can also become unsustainable over the course of years. For instance, 2 to the 12th power is a 4096 hour penalty or approximately half a year, which if the 12 violations happen over 5 years is a reasonable amount of offenses especially when Telos becomes more difficult to run because of increased usage.

Community Sentiment

Based on polling of the Telos community in Telegram, the results favored increasing the penalty to one week, with an additional one week increase per offense within the previous 6 months. The raw results of the poll are as follows:

Poll from Telos Governance Channel. Sample size: 40.

Detroit Ledger Technologies is proposing this rule will initially be enforced in a similar manner to the Telos testnet requirement of not having node downtime for 7 consecutive days. Daniel Marcelo, Telos Block Producer Monitor, will issue an ‘votebpout’ msig for block producers to execute upon the automatic removal of the offending producer by the existing script. Daniel will also monitor the number of offenses and adjust the duration accordingly. In the meantime, we will evaluate the requirements for upgrading the script and smart contracts (if needed) to automatically calculate and create the msig for block producers to sign.

Proposed Updated Clause 7

The full proposed Clause 7 is as follows:

If {{producer}} is unable to perform obligations under this human-language contract I will resign my position by resubmitting this contract with the null producer key. If {{producer}} fails to resign when unable to perform said obligations, {{producer}} shall be removed by automated contract or by actions of the remaining block producers. {{producer}} may be removed at any time when it fails to produce 15% or more of its assigned blocks in a rotation of the block producer scheduling routine, or when 1/3–1 block producers are failing to produce blocks on the current schedule and {{producer}} is the block producer with the highest number of missed blocks or the lowest percentage of Member votes among the group of block producers that is failing to produce blocks. {{producer}} being removed for failing to produce 15% or more of its assigned blocks in a rotation of the block producer scheduling routine, shall be cause for my disqualification from all service as a block producer for 1,245,000 blocks (approximately 1 week) multiplied by the number of offenses by {{producer}} within the last 31,500,000 blocks (approximately 6 months).

Vote on the Amend Proposal Now!

The Amend proposal for this change is now live. You can vote on the proposed changes through the following methods:

• Browser (desktop / mobile):
• DecideVoter (iOS / Android):