Nerfing whales while rewarding loyalty

In addition to earning KCAL, staking SOUL brings other benefits. Phantasma’s decentralized governance gives users voting power relative to their staked SOUL amount and also the duration of their staking. The formula is as follows:

Voting Power = sqr[amount staked] x [days staked], with the weight of staking duration capped at 1000 consecutive days of staking.

Long term supporters of the ecosystem carry far more weight than someone who joined and staked their SOUL yesterday. This helps avoid instability in governance through rapidly changing token holders. A risk to all PoS based blockchains is that large token hodlers may have too much influence. This can be harmful for the evolution of the chain and ecosystem. At Phantasma, this is mitigated through basing voting power on the square root of the amount of SOUL staked. Thus a few small token holders may actually have the same influence as a single token holder with far more tokens. As an example, see how 10 token holders with moderate amounts achieve the same voting power as a single token holder with 10 times their cumulative amount staked:

Single token holder, 1,000,000 SOUL staked for 1000 days: Voting power = (sqr)1,000,000 x 1,000 = 1,000 x 1,000 = 1,000,000
Ten token holders staking 10,000 SOUL for 1000 days, 100,000 SOUL staked in total: 10x (sqr)10,000 x 1,000 = 10x 100,000 = 1,000,000

Decentralized governance has not yet been activated on the user interface as we are still busy perfecting and adding functionality to the core chain. As soon as this is done, decentralized governance will take over control of multiple parameters of the chain. Make sure you are in a position to make your voice heard!