Polkadot Passes Proposal to Make DOTs ‘More Ergonomic’

Polkadot’s first major voting proposal passed with 86% in favor of multiplying the DOT supply 100-fold.

The first token-based vote on the Polkadot network passed in favor of multiplying the DOT supply 100-fold.

As announced on Monday, a proposal to give DOTs a “more ergonomic” value was accepted by the community with 86% of the votes cast in favor. Only 4% of the votes were cast against any redenomination, while 10x and 1000x split variants gathered 20% and 24% respectively as tokenholders expressed multiple preferences.

The vote lasted two weeks, with 2.86 million out of a total 5.4 million tokens joining in the vote. Parity Technologies and Web3 Foundation, the two main entities developing Polkadot, abstained from the vote after initial plans to redenominate the tokens without the token holders' vote.

The DOTs only had another named unit, the Planck, with 100 million Plancks equaling one DOT. The denomination is said to have been “useless for practical purposes,” as its value is many orders of magnitude less than a cent.

The results of the vote would put Polkadot’s supply to about five times that of Ethereum (ETH), and according to the leaked prices in Polkadot’s latest token sale, each token would be worth $1.25. Since this is merely a redenomination, no changes in the actual supply are made as each DOT simply becomes 100 DOTs.

The redenomination is set to occur 72 hours after DOT transfers are enabled, which should happen around 1 PM UTC on August 18. The change is thus expected to occur on August 21.

Quietly launched token sale

As Cointelegraph reported previously, Polkadot is currently in the midst of running a public token sale for 300,000 DOTs, initially valued at $125.

The team appears to be not commenting or publicizing the sale, likely due to restrictions related to Regulation S offerings.

That did not preclude the project from collecting 3925 BTC as of press time, worth more than $4 million.

The token sale was launched shortly after on July 21 the network lost its crutches in the form of special admin keys on July 21.

Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot and Ethereum, is a strong supporter of formalized governance systems in blockchains.