Record & Evaluation of Political Pledges
In April 2018, Pan-Impact Korea had deployed a smart contract on Ethereum blockchain platform that records and evaluates the political pledges of politicians.
On June 15, 2018, after the local elections were over in Korea, Pan-Impact Korea deployed updated smart contracts and recorded political pledges of the elects of 3 local governments, in which have the largest populations. Those are Seoul City Government, Busan City Government and Gyeonggi Provincial Government. Pan-Impact Korea made them impossible to modify or delete the records and the pledges are going to be kept in blockchain permanently.
Pan-Impact Korea issued 50 million tokens for each elected person and the number 50 million represents the population of South Korea. The symbol of tokens is ‘Cred’, stemmed from the word ‘credibility’.
Pan-Impact Korea will evaluate the degree of implementation of pledges. The smart contracts have the function that enables people to evaluate how well the politicians performed the promises and the contracts automatically report the results.
Pan-Impact Korea will burn the tokens according to the evaluation result. Though the tokens do not have any economic value, it has the value of credibility. Therefore, the number of remaining coins represents politicians’ ‘credibility capital’, and the people can compare politicians’ credibility levels.
As all of the information will be kept permanently in blockchain, politicians’ should pay more attention to avoid false pledges, and keep their promises. Otherwise, they will lose their credibility capital.
It is the experiment that demonstrates blockchain is used to improve politics and increase the right of voters, and it also can be interpreted as a new way of manifesto movement.
Functional Description
The main functions of the smart contracts are described below.
(1) Overall structure consists of a administration contract and sub-contracts of politicians. The administration contract is the central bank of credibility capital as it issues, allocates, burns tokens and manages resources. Politicians’ sub-contracts are linked to the administration contract and they interconnect information with it.
As the symbol of the tokens is ‘Cred’, the administration contract was named ‘Cred Bank’.
Figure 1. The overall structure of the smart contracts. Each politician’s smart contract is connected to Cred Bank, the administration contract.
(2) 50 million tokens for each politician were issued, and tokens are used as a measure of credibility.
Cred does not have any commercial value.
Cred Bank is able to check and compare the politicians’ credibility capital.
(3) Top 10 essential pledges from each politician were recorded on each one’s smart contract.
The contracts were made impossible even for the issuer to modify or delete.
Political pledges are official promises made to voters and storing them as historical records has its own justification.
(4) Before the end of each one’s term, the performance of promises will be evaluated.
People can access to the contracts and score each promise once, and the number of evaluators, total and average scores will be released automatically.
(5) The tokens allocated to each politician will be burnt according to the evaluation result.
For example, if a politician keeps only half of the promises, then 50% of the tokens will be burnt.
People can easily compare the credibility levels of politicians watching the number of tokens after evaluation.
Figure 2. People can compare politicians’ credibility levels through the web site Etherscan.
// The Reasons of Using Tokens without Any Commercial Value as a Measure of Credibility //
# It is more intuitive and effective to represent ‘credibility capital’ in a monetary unit than mere numbers.
# Using standard ERC20 tokens ensures openness to the public as people can watch them through wallet programs / blockchain information sites / mobile applications, etc.
# It can develop a model that uses token as the measure of credibility rather than of commerce, and it expresses persuasively that the loss of tokens is in effect the loss of credibility.
The Meaning of the Project
After Pan-Impact Korea had developed the first smart social impact bond(SIB) to improve intermediation method of impact investment, it tried to utilize blockchain to improve political culture.
It is a meaningful public project that demonstrates blockchain is applied to politics, and a good beginning of change that tokens are not used as for-profit value, but the measure of credibility value. If the people and politicians are conscious of it, we will see public benefit is expanded in the future.
In addition to this, if we are able to show that blockchain is entirely used for a public goal to improve politics and the rights of voters, our understanding and receptivity for the technology will be increased.
Pan-Impact Korea is interested in social science application of blockchain as a social innovation company, and will continue to discover and implement new ideas that contribute to the public interest as well as impact investing.
// The Addresses of the Smart Contracts //
# Cred Bank : 0xe10406d76d24b0eef12f18e48699cb3bfb43e0e3
# Mayor of Seoul : 0xbeab0ecd09941a8d998537bd3574283f4e5c0104
# Mayor of Busan : 0xed5365be89f4fa04d9980efe9250ee49b1e64a48
# Governor of Gyeonggi Province : 0xbeca2901bf4484d8660c82202eb73c2f86790d0f