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Congress

Utility
0x8539f6c5a2a8...34cc5009227e
HomesteadSource VerifiedEdit this contract
Deployed June 27, 2016 (10 years ago)Block 1,778,388

The Congress contract from the ethereum.org tutorial: an owner appoints members with voting weight, and proposals pass on a margin the owner sets.

Homestead EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

Congress is the version of the governance tutorial where membership is appointed rather than bought, which makes it a board rather than a shareholder meeting and the direct ancestor of the council and multisig arrangements that most protocols actually use. It also shows the weakness that shape carries: an owner who can rewrite the membership and the majority margin does not need to win a vote.

Context

Deployed in June 2016, days before The DAO was drained, when the ethereum.org tutorials were the standard source for anyone building an organisation on chain and shareholder governance was about to become the most discussed subject in Ethereum.

Key Facts
Deployment Block
1,778,388
Deployment Date
Jun 27, 2016, 02:36 AM
Code Size
4.5 KB
Transactions by Year
20165

Description

The Congress variant of the ethereum.org governance tutorial. Membership is a list the owner maintains through changeMembership, which names a member and the weight their vote carries, so voting power is granted rather than bought. The owner also sets the three rules that decide outcomes: a minimum quorum, a debating period in minutes, and a majority margin the yes votes must exceed.

Any member may open a proposal naming a recipient, an amount and the transaction bytecode to send, and the contract stores a hash of those three things so the exact transaction being voted on is fixed before voting starts. Members vote for or against with a justification recorded alongside, and after the deadline anyone may execute the proposal by supplying the bytecode again for the contract to check.

Because the owner can change the membership and the rules at any time, including while a proposal is open, the governance is advisory over anything the owner cares about.

Heuristic Analysis

The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.

Detected Type: Utility

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes4,595
Unique Opcodes214
Jump Instructions196
Storage Operations155

External Links

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