Democratic App Ranking: Democracy Earth to Represent Blockstack Community Vote on App Mining

As we often say, governance is the next big challenge for decentralized networks such as Democracy Earth and Blockstack. If carefully planned for, and properly executed, great governance is also an enormous opportunity, enabling such networks to fully benefit from their most valuable resource: high quality input coming from the stakeholders within it.

Creating channels through which those signals can be received and transformed into constructive output is no small task, but our alpha run with Blockstack was a successful first look at what is to come.

“App Mining” powered by Blockstack, is a new way for app founders on the Blockstack platform to earn crypto, currently paid in bitcoin. It consists of a process that will directly fund development teams who are creating valuable applications on Blockstack.

At a high level, app founders that build great apps using Blockstack get paid each month, in order of that month’s app quality ranking. The payouts are currently administered by Blockstack PBC and facilitated by app.co. The ranking is determined by a set of “App Reviewers”, one of them being the Democracy Earth Foundation.

In keeping with Democracy Earth’s ethos our criteria is a democratic one: token holders, being those most invested in the success of the Blockstack network, will be able to vote on the apps they think most benefit the ecosystem and should be supported through App Mining.

The first voting pilot took place between September 27 and October 10, when a test group of Blockstack token holders were given the option to join the alpha run and cast their votes. Each voter received 1000 votes to distribute among the apps, being able to signal both if the app should or should not receive rewards. In this pilot they had 15 participating token holders voting across Blockstack apps. After combining our results with the alpha run implemented with Product Hunt, the first App Mining results are as follows:

We are pleased with these first results and look forward to continuing building better and more resilient governance systems.

The next round of voting will be held in December, 2018 with $100k paid out in BTC across apps! To learn more or register your app, please see https://app.co/mining. We look forward to seeing what is built and to bringing forward the voice of the Blockstack community!