Decentralization has been our embedded DNA, from day one of the Metis project.
When our co-founders first met each other and talked about all our future plans, each of us kept coming back to these key points:
- Our co-founders are only initiators, not the ones who will control the entire project, or anything close. To show that we’re serious, we will only take a small part of the token allocations (the entire Metis team, founders included, owns just 7% of the total supply).
- Investors are our early supporters, but they are also only one part of the whole community. As a result, their allocation will also be limited, to less than 20%.
- By extension, the vast majority of our lifetime token supply will be reserved for our community. In fact, half of our already limited lifetime token supply of 10 million tokens would be reserved exclusively for community mining purposes, taking place over a span of 10 years.
- The project will be purely decentralized, both in terms of infrastructure and management.
Building a Decentralized Infrastructure
To accomplish this decentralization goal in the infrastructure layer, we have designed multiple different mechanisms. These include Multiple Virtual Machines, Sequencer Pool, Rangers, Peer Nodes, and our evolution on the idea of DAOs: DACs, or Decentralized Autonomous Companies.
Our next step will be the launch of our Layer 2 mainnet, Andromeda. We recently announced that Andromeda would feature EVM Equivalence, enabling Ethereum DApps to easily migrate onto the Metis Layer 2 network. The problem is that EVM Equivalence makes it impossible to perform the on-chain fraud proofs that have until now been a hallmark of Optimistic Rollups.
Optimism’s plan to handle that drawback is to simply give up much of its decentralization for the sake of accommodating EVM Equivalence. But as we detailed last week, Metis will enable simple DApp integration through EVM Equivalence, and maintain the highest levels of decentralization, thanks to those aforementioned MVMs, Sequencer Pool, Rangers, and Peer Nodes.
That’s just the beginning of our plan. To demonstrate our uncompromising commitment to decentralization, we’re introducing our own decentralization roadmap. Here are the steps we plan to take to honor our DNA over the next few months.
- Andromeda launch, Week of November 15, 2021: Verifier Nodes will be available to challenge all transactions. A special incentive mechanism will be used to keep all the Verifiers actively involved in maintaining the security of the network.
- Rest of 2021: All the Layer 1 smart contracts will be managed by our DAC community; the incentive, challenge and punishment mechanisms involved will thus all be optimized.
- Q1 2022: Verifiers will conduct real-time verifications, thus shortening the finalization window for transactions. Instead of a week or more for withdrawals from Layer 2 to Layer 1, L2-L1 withdrawals using Metis will take just a few hours, and eventually just a few minutes.
- Q2 2022: The Metis Sequencer Pool will open for community participation. All the verifiers will be added into the Sequencer Pool automatically. A challenge and voting mechanism will be implemented to choose which one can be the next sequencer, ensuring that Sequencer positions rotate efficiently.
- Q3 2022: We will release the cloud deployment code for both the main and peer nodes, enabling everyone to run a Metis node with high security and efficiency.
When we reach that final stage, the Metis Layer 2 infrastructure will have achieved 100%, complete decentralization. No other Rollup, commit chain, side chain, or any other kind of Ethereum scaling solution can make that claim.
Metis Belongs to You, not to Us
All of these steps tie back to our original mission: to make our founders the initiators of the Metis project, but not its ultimate leaders.
In the near future, we will publish detailed plans on how we intend to convert the management of Metis from our core team to our community as a whole. Rather than Metis existing as a centralized company, it will instead be governed and managed by the Metis DAC framework — the Metisverse.
In decentralization we believe. In decentralization we trust.
