The improved structure of Haveno. Key word: Decentralization

Haveno Core Team | 02 Feb 2022

Hey folks, we have some exciting news to share about the structure of Haveno.

We recently opened a CCS proposal to crowdfund the money to pay the frontend team that will build the user interface of Haveno. During the conversation, people expressed the desire to see Haveno more decentralized and censorship-resistant. The main concern was related to the so called “operators”, a third party entity that would have managed the ‘live’ exchange, while the Haveno Core Team (HCT) would have taken care of the code and everything else not related to the live platform. Adopting this structure wasn’t an easy choice, but we decided it was the best option at the time while constantly brainstorming on ways to decentralize Haveno.

While the CCS was open and being discussed, some Monero community members came up with some ideas to decentralize Haveno. We thought some of the suggestions were valid and a good base to work on, so we closed the CCS and started to work on a more decentralized structure.

This is very exciting for us. The idea behind Haveno sparked out of the desire to provide a decentralized and P2P platform where people can sell and buy Monero for fiat or other cryptocurrencies, while at the same time fund and support Monero development. This new structure will make it much easier to reach that goal.

Monero’s Engine

The structure we have in mind is fairly simple and we hope the community will be as excited about it as we are.

Haveno will be developed on the repositories managed by the HCT (https://github.com/haveno-dex/) and will always be free and open source software, developed by the HCT with the help and support of the community.

The idea is to send 100% of the fees paid by users on Haveno to a CCS system, that from now on we will call Engine. Engine will work very similarly to the CCS managed by the Monero Core Team (MCT). The difference is that the funds will be provided by the fees generated by Haveno, instead of generous donors. You probably already see where we are going. Engine will receive a constant stream of funds that can be used to fund Monero development. No more need to rely on donors. Monero will finally become self-sustaining, which would be a major achievement towards autonomy and independence.

People will be able to propose their skills or maybe even post bounties. The Haveno and Monero communities will be called to comment on these proposals and the Engine Council will take the final decision about approving or rejecting the proposal. The Engine Council would have the same role the MCT currently has in the Monero CCS.

Engine Council

We propose that the Engine Council is composed of 5 members of the Haveno and Monero communities. More specifically, we would like to have at least 1 member of the Monero Core Team, 1 long-term monero developer, and 1 Haveno community member chosen by the HCT in the council. The other members could be chosen within the Haveno and Monero communities.

The Haveno Core Team won’t be part of the council.

As stated above, the council will vote to accept/refuse proposals. A multisig wallet could be set up among members, which will continuously receive the funds from Haveno.

With this structure, Haveno won’t need third parties or legal entities, since all fee earnings will be directly sent to the Engine fund after every trade.

The HCT and Haveno development

The Haveno core team will open Engine proposals every 6/12 months, asking to receive half of the total fees sent to Engine monthly in one month as compensation. This will ensure that the work of the HCT will stay accountable to the community and ensure that the leads of the projects are rewarded for their efforts (we are funding ourselves at the moment).

This structure will make the actions of the HCT accountable to the community, which will decide through the Engine Council if they want to keep supporting the work of the HCT. It will also make development much more flexible: the current bounty-based system could be kept and the Engine system would work in parallel, giving people the possibility to open Engine proposal and get compensated for working on Monero or Haveno.

It’s important to note that the HCT is very different from the MCT. The MCT adopts a hands-off approach, while we do the opposite. The HCT leads and is deeply involved in Haveno development and community growth/management.

Arbitrators and seednodes

Arbitrators are a fundamental part of Haveno and will resolve trade disputes. They are sensitive role, because they hold one of the 3 keys of a trade on Haveno. Arbitrators will be trustworthy community members, who will apply for the role through Engine proposals. The community will vote and the Engine Council will take the final decision. The HCT will respect the decision of the Council and will provide arbitrators all the tools and support they need.

Arbitrators will be paid through Engine proposals and will be free to offer their terms to the community. This would open a market of arbitrators and will allow Haveno to scale. In the future, Arbitrators speaking languages different than english will be required, for example.

Seednodes will be run by the Haveno Core Team, but also by community members to ensure more network resistance. Note that seednodes are a sensitive part of the network and their operators have to be trusted members of the community. The HCT reserves the right to only add to the code base seed nodes that are run by long term and trusted Monero/Haveno community members.

The alternative

An alternative to Engine would be to rely on the MCT. Instead of creating a dedicated system, we could rely on the existent CCS, managed by the Monero Core team. This would centralize things on the MCT, but could make people more comfortable, since they are a trusted entity that stewards the Monero project. We are already in talks with the core team to see what they think about the two options.

How we see the future

The important thing for us is to keep Haveno decentralized and community focused. We will always be looking to improve these aspects. That’s why we don’t exclude different governance systems in the future. For example, it could be interesting to plug Haveno into an external DAO for governance. It could be even more interesting to build this DAO on Monero! In the future we could have colored coins on the Monero blockchain or other mechanisms to empower the community. There are infinite possibilities. The point is that with the constant stream of funds, Haveno will provide: we will open the doors to a lot of possibilities that went unexplored until now because of the absence of a reliable stream of funds.

Let’s make a practical example. Bisq’s revenue in the month of January was about 66k USD (source). In Haveno, the entire amount will be sent to Engine, but the HCT will request half of the amount through an engine proposal. This means about 33K USD will be available for funding whatever the community thinks should be funded to push Monero and Haveno forward. Now imagine how many improvements/projects we could fund with that amount of funds coming regularly :).

While we don’t expect to reach Bisq’s revenue numbers right after launch, we do think that Bisq is massively underperforming and we believe Haveno could dwarf their numbers in the future.

Conclusion

These are exciting times. Funding is the main issue of any open source project. See Bitcoin for an example: it has recently seen developers leaving the project because they could not afford to work on it as volunteers anymore and there were no chances of being funded. The Engine system would resolve this problem and revolutionize the way Monero is developed, all while making it self-sustaining. We look forward to receive feedback from the community.

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