12 improvements proposals up for voting

approved and published on 10/21/2019

Dear reader,

as you know, the governance system of BitShares requires new features to be approved by BTS holders. In the last months, the developers and the community have put together multiple BitShares Improvement Proposals (BSIPs) of which, the following 13 are ready for voting:

• BSIP 73: Match force-settlement orders with margin calls and limit orders Force settlements are the last resort measure to guarantee the SmartCoin holders to obtain the underlying collateral, this happened often at a price below market price. With this change, force settlements are matched dynamically for best price under certain conditions.

• BSIP 72: Tanks and Taps: A General Solution for Smart Contract Asset Handling Introduction of simple and ready-to-use interface for dapp developers to allow rapid development and a reduced time to market. Dapp developers don’t need their own infrastructure or complicated smart contracts, they can utilize the proposed infrastructure and will share a consistent, secure and easy-to-visualize asset handling model. This will become increasingly familiar to users of dapps based on BitShares, giving the developers and users confidence.

• BSIP 70: Peer-to-Peer Leveraged Trading Introduction of peer-to-peer lending markets that allow borrowing and margin trading on the BitShares DEX, while the lender gets paid interest and is protected by automatic margin call mechanisms.

• BSIP 69: Additional Assert Predicates Enables operations for conditional validition of transactions for various use cases, including safety of transactions that depend on recent prior transactions. Paves the way for Payment Channels and the Interledger Protocol.

• BSIP 64: Optional HTLC preimage length, HASH160 addition, and memo field Extension of the HTLC operation to directly include the most common hashing algorithm, make the preimage length optional and introduce an optional memo message. This is standardizing our HTLCs inline with other blockchains.

• BSIP 62: Close margin position Closing a short position comes with a risk of getting margin called if no spare funds are available to buy the long and reduce the debt to zero. This BSIP introduces a way to put the short position directly on the market.

• BSIP 61: Operation to Update Limit Orders Allows that limit orders can be updated instead of canceled and re-created with adjusted price. This comes with a smaller fee, reduces chain bloat and processing power, and is thus beneficial for users (like market makers) and the blockchain alike.

• BSIP 57: Managed Vesting Balances Managed vesting balances allows the user to realize several use cases, among them are a savings balance, purposeful staking of assets and non-custodial onboarding into centralized services.

• BSIP 47: Vote Proxies for Different Referendum Categories and explicit voting operation For each vote category (witness, committee and worker) you may need quite specialized knowledge into the matter to come to an elaborate voting slate. Thus, this BSIP introduces the ability to set a proxy for each category, instead all for one like currently. On top of that, it introduces a new operation tailored for voting, enhancing user security and reducing blockchain bloat.

• BSIP 45: Add BitAsset as Backing Collateral flag/permission Asset owners should be able to decide if their asset may be used as collateral for a new SmartCoin.

• BSIP 39: Automatically approve proposals by the proposer This facilitates elaborate use-cases for proposals, e.g. involving 2FA, by allowing the creator of the proposal to implicitly give approval to the proposal as well.

• BSIP 22: Vote Decay for Witnesses, Committee members & Proxies Encourage an active voting population by introducing a sophisticated vote decay scheme. Those that seek to be voted into power will need to actively campaign in order to stay within approval.

Please review these proposals (they all come with a short summary) and make a decision on each of them if you support that particular change.

At this point, we would like to emphasize that the BBF does not participate in governance processes, has no opinion on any of these proposals, stays neutral with respect to all aspects of on-chain governance.