Q International Foundation’s Voting Policy lays down the principles according to which it exercises the voting rights attached to its Q tokens (QGOV). Amongst other things, Q International Foundation has committed itself to provide full transparency of its voting behavior.

There is currently an active proposal to upgrade the Q protocol and change the Q Constitution. This proposal is connected to the “Athos” hard fork, which — among other things — introduces account aliases to the Q protocol.

Intended voting action

Q International Foundation supports this proposal and intends to vote “yes” in a directional vote in accordance with par. 2. b. of its Voting Policy.

Rationale

Account aliases, the main feature improvement proposed, enable validator nodes and root nodes to use separate private keys for participating in validation and custody of funds. This leads to an improvement in operational security for node operators, since compromised private keys that are operationally used for signing blocks do not automatically result in a risk of loss of funds.

The goal of this proposal is reasonable and helpful: By supporting improvements in node operators’ operational security, the Q protocol is expected to become more attractive for professional validators and governance participants. Conversely, a loss of funds by node operators — even if it were due to node operators’ own negligence — could deter capable node operators and infrastructure providers from supporting Q. Therefore, in principle this proposal should be supported. Furthermore, the Athos hard fork has already been successfully implemented on the Q testnet and there are no adverse indications as to the feasibility of a successful implementation the Athos hard fork on the Q mainnet.

Given the strong benefit for major stakeholder groups of the Q protocol, we deem this proposal to have a “high relevance” as defined in par. 2 of the Voting Policy. The implementation of this proposal is in our view be “in the best interest of Q” as required in par. 1 of the Voting Policy.