Buy & Swap Decred (DCR)

A forum sketch with an awkward name

Decred's official history is refreshingly unglamorous. The design came from the Memcoin2 proposal on Bitcointalk in April 2013. Its author, tacotime, worked with another forum user known as _ingsoc and with Jake Yocom-Piatt to turn the hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake design into a real project. Memcoin2 did not survive as a name; the idea did.

The code has an interesting parent. Rather than copying Bitcoin's C++ client, the team built on btcsuite, an alternative Bitcoin node written in Go by Company 0, LLC. The project's own documentation is careful to add that Decred is a standalone cryptocurrency, not a Bitcoin fork: it borrowed a well-tested codebase, then went its own way. Work began in February 2014 and mainnet did not launch until February 8, 2016, which is a long runway by crypto standards.^{[1], [2], [3]}

The lottery that turns holders into judges

The heart of Decred is a ticket system. Anyone holding enough DCR can time-lock coins to buy a ticket. In every block, five tickets are chosen pseudo-randomly and called to vote. At least three must approve the previous block. If most of them reject it, the miner who produced that block loses the reward and the transactions go back into the queue.

That small rule changes the balance of power. In a pure proof-of-work coin, miners mainly enforce the rules and therefore carry a lot of weight in any dispute. In Decred, miners cannot keep building on a chain unless the called tickets sign off. The documentation frames this as protection against behaviour such as mining empty blocks and against contentious hard forks. Voters are paid for the job too: ticket holders collectively receive 89 percent of the block reward when their tickets vote.

The obscure detail that shows how early this ran: since block 4,096, mined on February 21, 2016, every Decred block has carried the votes of at least three tickets. The system was switched on within two weeks of launch and has been used ever since.^{[4], [5], [6], [7]}

Voting on the rules, then on the money

Tickets also vote on consensus rule changes, and a change needs 75 percent of non-abstaining tickets to activate. On July 9, 2017, tickets approved a change to Decred's stake difficulty algorithm. Decred's history calls it the first consensus vote in the history of cryptocurrency to change such a rule on-chain; that is the project's own description and is recorded here as such.

Bigger questions moved to Politeia, the off-chain proposal system launched in October 2018. Stakeholders use it to vote on how treasury funds are spent and on policy matters such as amendments to the Decred constitution. Contractors have submitted their invoices through a Politeia-based system since April 2019, which leaves a durable record of who was paid for what. In 2020 a two-stage Request for Proposals format was added; the first RFP concluded with every candidate rejected, a small reminder that the voters do actually say no.^{[8], [9], [10], [11]}

A steady stream of quiet firsts

Decred has a habit of shipping infrastructure without much noise. Its timeline lists atomic swap tools with Bitcoin and Litecoin support in October 2017, Lightning Network support activated on mainnet in May 2019, and CoinShuffle++ mixing live from August 2019. None of these made DCR a household name, but together they describe a project that treats the coin as a working system rather than a marketing object.

The constitution is worth a look for anyone interested in the philosophy. It sets out principles such as free and open-source software, privacy and security, and inclusive, fair participation, and it is itself amendable only by stakeholder vote.^{[12], [13]}

What the official sources leave open

UNKNOWN from official sources: the reviewed pages do not say how many holders take part in ticket voting today or how concentrated voting power is. Hybrid governance only protects the network as well as the participation behind it.

The documentation describes Decred's airdrop and small premine at launch as fair and transparent; that is the project's own assessment. Readers who care about initial distribution can review the published launch details directly.^{[14], [15]}