Fermat, the decentralized, blockchain and graphchain-enabled open source project developing the Internet of People (IoP), has announced a new release of its distributed governance system.

The system features an embedded voting system inspired by that of rapidly growing cryptocurrency Dash, but with special features including “community-cancelable contracts”.

Launched in April 2016, Fermat is building an infrastructure with an open social graph, direct access channel to people and direct device to device communication. Dubbed as the “Internet of People”, this new technological paradigm removes all unnecessary intermediaries resulting in cheaper transactions, according to the official release.

“Fermat’s graphchain technology enables both a global mapping of everybody with verified proof of how they are related, and also people to people and company to people interactions without going through intermediaries. In order to achieve this as a decentralized open source project we need a sound distributed governance system, one which includes Contribution Contracts,” said Luis Molina, Founder of Fermat.

Fermat explained that using its contribution contracts, any individual or entity interested in offering their services – software development, marketing or business development support – would be able to submit a proposal to the community of token holders. Each token holder is then able to vote yes or no on each contractor submission, ultimately accepting or declining proposals.

Unique to Fermat, contracts that payout over time can also be terminated by the network after being accepted, a feature that incentives proposal owners to effectively communicate and continuously prove value publicly. A mobile app is used by both contributors and community allows members to discuss contribution contracts in detail.  

In order to record both the contribution contracts submitted and the votes cast by community members, a blockchain is used as an immutable database. Projects supported by the community are funded by the blockchain, which automatically allocates a portion of newly minted tokens to the contributors responsible for the execution of these projects.  

“At the beginning, only token holders may vote. In the future, it is our aim that the system will evolve to include reputation of the participants and will consider their voting history and project outcomes,” added Molina.

Furthermore, Fermat revealed that senior advisor Guillermo Villanueva is currently designing phase three of the governance system.

“Phase three of our governance system is about communities, identity and reputation. Once released, it will allow us to govern a large project such as Fermat, which is in turn a set of different inter-related communities, but it will also offer governance, identity and reputation as a service for decentralized applications,” said Villanueva.

Fermat project’s mining community currently boasts of over 80 national and regional chapters worldwide, all of which have been established to mine IoP tokens in a highly-decentralized way. This includes chapters in every continent encompassing nearly all European countries and several US states. IoP tokens are currently traded on Bittrex and can be acquired with fiat currencies at Bitcoin Suisse AG.