As we approach the completion of the first active voting period, the proposal period, we would like to describe what’s to come during the second voting period. The first voting period saw the Athens protocols injection and bakers upvoted Athens A and/or Athens B, with Athens A, the most popular proposal, promoted for the second voting phase: the test voting period. In this new period, participants are asked to vote on whether to advance Athens A to the next stage: the testing period. Similarly as the first period, all participants will have 8 cycles, or just over 3 weeks, to submit their voting operation on the Tezos blockchain.

In this post, we will provide the instructions for participants to vote for the promotion of the current proposal to the testing period.

We also wish to remind Tezos participants that real-life amendment testing is currently happening on the Zeronet test network. We still encourage volunteers to actively participate using the instructions described in Nomadic’s previous blogpost.

How to vote in favor or against the first period’s winning proposal

In the first period, participants could upvote Athens A, Athens B or even submit an entirely new protocol proposal themselves. Athens A received the greater number of votes and has been promoted to the next period. This second period is called the test voting period. Its role is to determine if the protocol is considered worthy enough to enter the testing period which will be used to test the protocol in a side-chain.

In the following example, we show the different commands you may use to vote. As a reminder, Athens A hash is Pt24m4xiPbLDhVgVfABUjirbmda3yohdN82Sp9FeuAXJ4eV9otd and its content is available in this tar archive.

Very similarly to the first period, you can create and sign voting operation using the tezos-client:

• If you wish to vote for the promotion of this protocol, you can enter : $ tezos-client submit ballot for <delegate> Pt24m4xiPbLDhVgVfABUjirbmda3yohdN82Sp9FeuAXJ4eV9otd yay

• If you wish to vote against the promotion of this protocol, you can enter : $ tezos-client submit ballot for <delegate> Pt24m4xiPbLDhVgVfABUjirbmda3yohdN82Sp9FeuAXJ4eV9otd nay

• If you don’t wish to voice an opinion but still want to participate towards the quorum, you can enter : $ tezos-client submit ballot for <delegate> Pt24m4xiPbLDhVgVfABUjirbmda3yohdN82Sp9FeuAXJ4eV9otd pass

You can also use the client to display the current period’s progress:

$ tezos-client show voting period`
Current period: "testing_vote"
Blocks remaining until end of period: 1234
Current proposal: Pt24m4xiPbLDhVgVfABUjirbmda3yohdN82Sp9FeuAXJ4eV9otd
Ballots: { "yay": 1200, "nay": 0, "pass": 0 }
Current participation 60.00%, necessary quorum 80.00%
Current in favor 1200, needed supermajority 960

What will come next

At the end of this testing vote period in about three weeks, the current proposal will be promoted to testing if the participation rate (total of Yay, Nay, and Pass as a percentage of total rolls) is greater than 80% and a supermajority of 80% yay is met. pass votes also count towards the participation rate, but not in determining the supermajority, which is based on the ratio of ‘yay’ to ‘nay’ votes. If these conditions are not met, then the amendment process will be revert to the first period. In-depth details may be found in the Tezos documentation.

Following this second period, there are still two voting phases left provided that this period is successful:

• The testing period which will spawn a testchain (alongside the main one) running the selected protocol and allowing participants to verify the correctness of the new protocol;

• The promotion period which will again require participants to vote in order to finally adopt the new protocol.