Fourth quarter Assuming the amendment was approved, it will have been running in the testnet since the beginning of the third quarter. The stakeholders vote a second time to confirm they wish to promote the test protocol to the main protocol. This also requires the quorum to be met and an 80% supermajority. We deliberately chose a conservative approach to amendments. However, stakeholders are free to adopt amendments loosening or tightening this policy should they deem it beneficial 3.2 Proof-of-stake mechanism 3.2.1 Overview Our proof-of-stake mechanism is a mix of several ideas, including Slasher[1], chain-of-activity[2], and proof-of-burn. The following is a brief overview of the algorithm, the components of which are explained in more details below. Each block is mined by a random stakeholder (the miner) and includes mul- tiple signatures of the previous block provided by random stakeholders (the signers). Mining and signing both offer a small reward but also require making a one year safety deposit to be forfeited in the event of a double mining or double signing. Theprotocol unfolds in cycles of 2048 blocks. At the beginning of each cycle, a random seed is derived from numbers that block miners chose and committed to in the penultimate cycle, and revealed in the last. Using this random seed, a follow the coin strategy is used to allocate migning rights and signing rights to a specific addresses for the next cycle. See figure 1. 3.2.2 Clock The protocol imposes minimum delays between blocks. In principle, each block can be mined by any stakeholder. However, for a given block, each stakeholder is subject to a random minimum delay. The stakeholder receiving the highest priority may mine the block one minute after the previous block. The stake- holder receiving the second highest priority may mine the block two minutes after the previous block, the third, three minutes, and so on. Figure 1: Four cycles of the proof-of-stake mechanism 10