Polkadot’s First Community Vote Could Expand DOT Supply 1,000 Times

The Polkadot community is now able to vote on a redenomination proposal, which could see the supply of DOT tokens increase up to a thousand-fold, the project said in a blog post on 13 July.

According to the announcement, this will be the first community vote that has been held on Polkadot since the protocol went live in late May. All DOT (the protocol’s native token) holders and community members have been invited to participate in the vote, which will determine whether a redenomination will be held or not.

The President and co-founder of Web3 Foundation and founder of Polkadot, Gavin Wood, said in Monday’s blog post:

“A vote has been started that will alter the course of Polkadot and define the final denomination of its native DOT token. It affects all Polkadot stakeholders. If you have claimed your DOT on the mainnet, or you plan to, then you can – and should! – vote.”

Members of the community will have two weeks, from Monday, to cast their vote and finally define the DOT redenomination. They will be presented with four options to choose from, which include a “no change” option that will keep the token supply at the original 10 million. The other three options are three split variants from the original sale, and include redenominations of 10x, 100x, and 1,000x.

Wood further said in the blog post:

“This vote does not affect any economics of the Polkadot platform. Staking rewards, inflation, effective market capitalisation and the underlying balances of every account remain completely unchanged. It is ‘merely’ about what units we use to denominate the balances into ‘DOT’ for the purpose of display.”

This is not the first time that Polkadot has voted on this issue. The community voted on a similar proposal back in May, which at the time proposed to increase the DOT supply by 100 times, on Polkadot’s test tube blockchain, Kusama. Though the proposal passed, with “very little dissent”, the Web3 Foundation decided to conduct the vote one more time, this time on Polkadot, and with real DOT tokens.