As it prepares to transition into the Voltaire era later this year, Cardano is establishing the foundation for complete decentralization. By incorporating voting and treasury mechanisms, the Voltaire era attempts to create a self-sustaining system by enabling network participants to use their stake and voting rights to affect the network's future growth.
The distributed architecture that was first developed during the Shelley era is what the Cardano network currently uses. Yet, the platform needs to be able to maintain and improve itself decentralizedly in order to attain real decentralization. Once in place, the Voltaire era will allow network users to leverage the current staking and delegation procedures to offer Cardano enhancement ideas that stakeholders can vote on.
The Voltaire period will create a treasury system, pooling a portion of all transaction fees to support development efforts after the vote process, to finance future development. Once the voting and treasury processes are operational, IOG will no longer be in charge of Cardano. Instead, the community will be in charge of shaping the future of Cardano by providing the resources needed to expand and extend the platform from a safe, decentralized foundation set up by IOG.
IOG, the organization in charge of Cardano's research and development, gave an update on Cardano's Age of Voltaire on Friday, March 24. The upgrade emphasized a crucial element of Cardano's next-generation governance, CIP-1694, a Cardano Improvement Proposal named after the year of the French enlightenment thinker Voltaire. In order to provide on-chain procedures that improve democratic decision-making throughout the ecosystem, the concept is currently being designed and co-created with the community.
To gather feedback and make use of the collective wisdom of the Cardano community, IOG, the Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO co-hosted the CIP-1694 Workshop in Colorado around four weeks ago.
According to IOG, this event was the first of a series of community activities that will take place in 2023 with the goal of pushing the CIP toward validation and adoption by the community. As the platform gets ready to enter the Voltaire era and herald in a new era of governance, IOG is looking forward to additional seminars and debates in the upcoming months.