Fermat, the blockchain and graphchain-enabled open source project developing the ‘Internet of People’, has announced the release of its distributed governance system featuring an embedded voting system. Inspired by the cryptocurrency Dash, it adds special features including community-cancellable contracts.
Launched in April 2016, Fermat is building an infrastructure with an open social graph, direct access channel to people and direct device to device communication. Referred to as the Internet of People, it is designed to remove all unnecessary intermediaries, resulting in cheaper transactions.
Luis Molina, Founder of Fermat, commented: “Fermat’s graphchain technology enables both a global mapping of everybody with verified proof of how they are related, and also people to people and company to people interactions without going through intermediaries. In order to achieve this as a decentralized open source project we need a sound distributed governance system, one which includes Contribution Contracts,”
Fermat’s contribution contracts enable any individual or entity interested in offering their services, whether that is software development, marketing or business development support, to submit a proposal to the community of token holders. Each token holder is then able to vote yes or no on each contractor submission, ultimately accepting or declining proposals. Contracts that pay out over time can also be terminated by the network after being accepted, a feature that incentives proposal owners to effectively communicate and continuously prove value publicly. A mobile app is used by both contributors and community allows members to discuss contribution contracts in detail.
In order to record both the contribution contracts submitted and the votes cast by community members, a blockchain is used as an immutable database. Projects supported by the community are funded by the blockchain, which automatically allocates a portion of newly minted tokens to the contributors responsible for the execution of these projects.
Molina noted: “At the beginning, only token holders may vote. In the future, it is our aim that the system will evolve to include reputation of the participants and will consider their voting history and project outcomes,”
Since its inception Fermat has attracted global experts to the project. Senior advisor Guillermo Villanueva is currently designing phase three of the governance system. Twenty five years ago Villanueva designed, implemented and sold a core banking system throughout several countries in Latin America. Following this, he held a variety of roles at Microsoft before founding Grupo Sabra, a company specializing in software business solution development and implementation, where he currently serves as Managing Partner.
Villanueva explained: “Phase three of our governance system is about communities, identity and reputation. Once released, it will allow us to govern a large project such as Fermat, which is in turn a set of different inter-related communities, but it will also offer governance, identity and reputation as a service for decentralized applications,”
