Dillon Chen: Edgeware – Coordinating Distributed Communities With On-Chain Governance (#322)

Governance within any community has been a work in progress for humanity's history. The blockchain ecosystem continues to develop and offer an alternative to today's centralized powers. With this, distributed projects and technologies will need to enact clear governance to ensure viable competition with the streamlined decision-making processes present in today's institutions.

The absence of codified governance in Bitcoin may be one of its most significant traits, signaling to the world its predictability due to its inability to change drastically. New projects like Edgeware, however, hope to encode the rules of governance on-chain and ensure a transparent process for stakeholders wishing to participate.

Edgeware is a smart contract platform built on Polkadot's Substrate. Focused on developing community-owned governance tools, Edgeware is a distributed project where participants use the tools themselves to vote, delegate, and fund each other to upgrade the network. While initially developed by Commonwealth Labs, Edgeware at launch will be entirely managed by the community, which holds 90% of the tokens and resulting influence.

Topics discussed in this episode:
- What attracted Dillon to crypto and why he co-founded Commonwealth Labs
- Multi-chain governance
- How Edgeware is unique
- Building Edgeware on Polkadot’s Substrate
- Retrospection from the soft-launch of Edgeware
- What a “lockdrop” is, and why Edgeware had one
- The issues and controversy around the Edgeware launch and lockdrop
- The zero-day fork of Edgeware, Straightedge
- The future of Edgeware

Links mentioned in this episode:
- Edgeware Homepage: http://bit.ly/2Rcxo7d
- Commonwealth Homepage: http://bit.ly/2QN0J9s
- Relaunch: A Clean Genesis for Edgeware: http://bit.ly/2tYyH1W
- Edgeware White Paper: http://bit.ly/35VcTS8
- Edgeware blockchain launch gets hijacked by rival fork - Decrypt: http://bit.ly/2tfBPpR
- Edgeware Participation Statistics: http://bit.ly/2NnOe1R
- Straightedge: http://bit.ly/2QSTgpv
- Hey Straightedge - Conspiratus episode: http://bit.ly/30kVQI0
- Edgeware on Twitter: http://bit.ly/2R8ijUk
- Edgeware on Discord: http://bit.ly/2RqdWnV
- Edgeware White Paper: http://bit.ly/35VcTS8

Sponsors:
- Pepo: Meet the people shaping the crypto movement - https://pepo.com/epicenter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: https://epicenter.tv/322