Learn About Community Governance with Trust Wallet Founder Viktor Radchenko
Community governance is an essential part of the decentralized economy explains Trust Wallet founder Viktor Radchenko.
Adrian Sandiford interviewed Trust Wallet Founder and CEO, Viktor Radchenko, to provide you with insight into the importance of community governance in crypto.
Governance is a hot topic in DeFi. Can you discuss Trust Wallet’s model, and how users can participate in community governance?
The governance that we built came naturally. We always have lots of projects approaching us, and we don’t want to make the decision ourselves, and be the one that says: “This blockchain is a shitcoin and this one is not.” It needs to be done by the community, where they vote on the blockchains they think are valuable to them, so we don’t have any bias, like, “Oh, this blockchain is backed by good investors, so we’re going to add it”. We delegate it to the community.
For any blockchain to be integrated into Trust Wallet, they’re required to prepare a proposal, and then users who hold TWT (Trust Wallet Token) are able to vote on it. There’s a threshold to be met, and then that blockchain can be integrated.
The project creating a proposal is also required to create an open-source contribution to our core library called Wallet Core. Once they do that they can create a proposal for the community to vote on. Then it gets integrated if successful.
The way it works is our governance system is a DApp located at governance.trustwallet.com, where you can see a list of the different proposals. Then if you hold a TWT token on Binance Smart Chain, because it uses Smart Chain tokens, BEP-20, then you could do an off-chain governance call. It means that if you have 10 tokens, whenever you broadcast your vote, it will use that amount, the balance you have, to vote on a specific proposal.
It’s an active process. Not everyone needs to vote. We usually share any good proposals on our social media. They have to be compliant with our standards on how to create proposals. So it’s very important that whoever is going to create a proposal explains why it’s being created. We have a template: okay, what is this proposal all about, what’s the motivation, what’s the summary of this, what benefits the users, Trust Wallet, token holders, and so on. If those are compliant with our standards then we are able to share it with everyone.
So there are a couple of things here. First, it’s a better way for us to eliminate different shitcoins, and at the same time, it gives more power to users to decide what they want to do with integrations. But there is also an incentive part where those projects who want to integrate with Trust Wallet can give incentives for Trust Wallet holders to vote on the proposal because they can say: “Okay, we want to be integrated, and we’re willing to give away this amount of tokens to Trust Wallet users.” We’re trying to create a market where people get incentivized as a TWT holder. So it works for projects that want to integrate, and then for TWT holders, too.
You mentioned projects looking to make proposals also need to make a contribution to Wallet Core. Can you explain that a bit more?
Wallet Core is our core library that’s used by Trust Wallet to do integration for all the coins. So if you want to support Bitcoin, Litecoin, whatever, this is what that library’s doing. It’s abstracting the complexity for integrating a blockchain and creating this universal interface for people to utilize those blockchains as a library. It’s creating an intuitive interface to interact with any blockchain. You want to send Bitcoin? You’ll have a simple interface that says here’s how you do it — Bitcoin, and then 50 other blockchains. It’s very scalable so we can add more blockchains in the future.
There are other companies already using it. The Bitcoin.com Wallet is using this library to manage their Bitcoin transfers. And then the Crypto.com DeFi Wallet, they’re using this library to run all their blockchain signing. There are many other companies that use it. It’s a good library that allows you to interact with any blockchains easily. The way we’re trying to push this is we use it internally for Trust Wallet, but, at the same time, we allow other developers to create wallets in a way where they use this Wallet Core library as a foundation, and then they build their user interface on top of it.
The idea behind it is we wanted to consolidate all the blockchain complexity into one library that abstracted away all the technical details for a specific blockchain, and just creates a simple interface to interact with. We wanted to design the system so that it’s also useful to others because working with blockchains is very complicated. There is so much complexity. Every blockchain is very unique. So our goal was to create something that’s useful to us, and to others. That’s what it’s all about: open-source, where all the useful things you’ve built, you just give it away to others to use.
It’s useful for multiple reasons. First, we want to let other projects come and integrate with Trust Wallet easily. The second is we want to accelerate crypto itself. If every company is spending time on integrations then it’s going to take a lot longer to build infrastructure. So we try to be the ones who provide this library for any developer to start building with. Together we can accelerate crypto.