Contract Upgrades

Contracts have been built in such a way to allow for upgradability (existing logic of methods can be amended) and extensible in the future (new methods can be added), with interfaces remaining the same. This provides flexibility whilst new functionality is being added to the contracts but the nature of changing contracts in a live decentralized network may not be suitable for the use case. As these contracts will be owned by the Vow proposals manager, upgrades and extensions are voted on and implemented by the Vow community.

There are options to end the upgradable and extensible nature of these contracts by setting the owner of these additional extension contracts to a dead public address which can also be setup as a vote by the VOW community. This means this functionality can be turned off once it’s agreed that these contracts should be completely immutable. This is new ground in the wider space and we don’t know of any public projects approaching smart contract design in this way to overcome some of the restrictions of blockchain.