2.4 Governance Contract (GC)

The APIS is upgraded and configured by the decentralized group of API token holders, thus driving the Governance Contract (GC) to be the most important object in the design. The GC is a customized fork from the open-sourced Compound Governance Contract, which has proven to be the most comprehensive, well-audited governance module in the Ethereum ecosystem, as exhibited by its redeployment by other notable layer-two protocols, such as yearn.finance [17]. The purpose of the GC is to allow API token holders to upgrade the APIS Dispute Resolution Factory Contract and the APIS Optimistic Rollup Contract, as well as to implement additional smart contracts into the APIS protocol. API token holders can vote directly or delegate their votes to trusted counterparties; all votes require that the tokens remain locked in the GC for time = 1.504 days (10,000 Ethereum mainnet blocks) after the quorum is reached and the vote is finalized, to disincentivize malicious parties from purchasing API tokens to pass APIS Improvement Proposals (APiiPs) that negatively affect the APIS Network. The quorum required to approve an APiiP will be 25% of the network, although we hope that future APiiPs will vote to raise the quorum requirement as the project becomes increasingly decentralized through the API Liquidity Mining Program, as illustrated further in 3.3 Community Ownership.