The following document is a guide for Operator on-boarding to the NCN testing portion of the SOL gov project.
At accelerate during a community governance round table, Exo pitched a group about a new way of network level governance that would get rid of the archaic token transferring mechanism and allow stakers to participate in the voting process without reliance on their validator. This project was accepted by the working group and initial development was funded by Solana Foundation.
The system is relies on 2 smart contracts:
In simplest terms the snapshot NCN program is a Node Consensus Network (NCN) program that manages a list of operators and ballot boxes. The operators use the ballot boxes to vote and come to consensus on the root hash of a merkle tree representation of the network’s active stake at a point in time.
The Voting program uses the agreed upon merkle tree as the basis for voting weights. Validators voting weights start out as the sum of their delegations. But as their stakers cast their votes, the validator’s vote weight is decremented.
We’ve explained the added utility in the shortest terms possible to keep this document relevant to operator on-boarding.
We’re looking for a few new operators to on-board while we test. If you engage and perform the operations well, then you’ll likely be added to the mainnet NCN. Incentives for being an operator are TBD.