FIO Protocol

After years of building, integrating, educating, and advocating, the FIO Foundation is formally transitioning full stewardship of the FIO Protocol from the Foundation to the FIO community.

From day one, the FIO Foundation was chartered not to run, manage, or control the protocol, but to facilitate its growth until the ecosystem could stand on its own. That time has arrived. The Foundation is stepping back so that the community, the Block Producers, the integrators, the developers, and the token holders can step forward as the protocol’s permanent stewards.

What this means:

FIO Chain: The chain is a battle-tested fully decentralized, public Delegated Proof of Stake network operated by independent Block Producers around the world. It does not depend on the Foundation to produce blocks, validate transactions, or resolve FIO Handles.

Your FIO Handles, Domains, and Tokens: Registrations, renewals, transfers, requests, mappings, and all protocol functionality continue to operate exactly as they do today.

The protocol: The FIO protocol keeps evolving. FIO Improvement Proposals (FIPs), the Bug Bounty Program, and the open-source repositories on GitHub remain the way changes get proposed, reviewed, and shipped.

Governance: The on-chain machinery that makes FIO decentralized is not going anywhere. Token holders vote for Block Producers. Block Producers set fees and approve smart contract changes by supermajority. If you hold FIO tokens, get involved in the governance of the chain.

What is changing is that the Foundation itself, as a Cayman non-profit entity with a Board, Steering Committee, and Worker Proposal structure, will be sunsetting its legal entity operations. The work that has historically sat inside that structure will transition to community-led efforts, and any remaining treasury assets will be allocated toward outstanding obligations and dissolution costs.

Why This, and Why Now

Foundations, by design, are scaffolding. They are supposed to eventually come down. Several converging realities have brought us to this decision:

The protocol has matured. FIO Handles, Domains, Requests, Data, NFT signatures, and handle mapping are live, documented, SDK-supported, and integrated across dozens of wallets and exchanges. The core product is open source, and it is battle-tested on mainnet. Block Producers already run infrastructure and secure the chain. Independent developers already submit FIPs and maintain SDKs. Integrators already market and onboard users. Much of what the Foundation funds is work the community is already doing.

Foundation Reserves have been depleted. The 181,253,654 FIO Tokens that were reserved at Mainnet launch to seed Foundation operations, minted at 150,000 per day, ran out in July 2023. Since then, the Foundation has operated on transaction fees, TPID rewards, and reserves built up during earlier years. Following Binance’s recent delisting of the FIO Token, that treasury has now reached a point where continuing to support an already decentralized protocol is no longer the most sustainable structure for this ecosystem.

We recognize this is a significant transition, and we have chosen to approach it deliberately. After careful deliberation, the Board and Steering Committee concluded that the right path is to transition in an orderly, well-supported way. We believe the healthiest long-term outcome for FIO is a protocol that belongs entirely, operationally and philosophically, to the people who use it and build on it.

How Stewardship Transitions to the Community

Elements of the transition plan are already in motion. Some will happen over the coming months.

Block Producers become the primary operational backbone

The 21 active and 21 standby Block Producers already secure the chain, validate every transaction, approve smart contract changes by 2/3 + 1 supermajority, and set fees through continuous median submission. Going forward, Block Producers will also take the lead on:

Coordinating protocol upgrades and emergency response

Maintaining the core chain software and contract repositories

Approving and shepherding FIPs through review to deployment

Publishing status updates and health metrics for the network

Administering the Bridge Custodian set that operates the ETH, Polygon and Base bridges

If you are not already voting for Block Producers or proxying your FIO Tokens to someone who is, now is the moment to do so. Block Producer elections are the most direct lever token holders have to shape who operates and evolves the protocol. Every FIO Token is a vote.

The FIP process remains the canonical way changes happen

Nothing about FIO Improvement Proposals changes structurally. Anyone can still open a FIP in the fioprotocol/fips repository on GitHub. Community review still happens in the open. Block Producer supermajority still governs contract deployment. What changes is that the Foundation will no longer be the default sponsor, impact-statement author, or funder for new FIPs. That role moves to the community: Block Producers, integrators, and independent contributors who care enough about an improvement to shepherd it.

Ongoing revenue streams

The protocol’s economic model does not depend on the Foundation to keep running. Block Producers continue to receive 60% of every fee collected. Stakers continue to receive 25%. Integrators continue to receive 10% of fees via TPID (currently boosted to 50% via New User Bounties for qualifying integrators) and 11% of staking rewards when their users unstake. These flows are enshrined in the chain itself. They do not switch off.

The 5% of fees historically paid to the Foundation will be addressed as part of the transition. Options on the table include redirecting this share to Block Producers, to a community-controlled treasury, to stakers, or to a combination, subject to a FIP and Block Producer approval. We will not make this decision unilaterally. The community will.

Websites, documentation, and infrastructure

fio.net, dev.fio.net, the FIO Dashboard, and other Foundation-operated properties will transition to community maintainers where there is willingness and capacity to take them over, or will be archived in a way that preserves history and keeps the ecosystem documented. Source code and documentation are already open source.

Partnerships and integrations

Integrators who have active partnerships, co-marketing commitments, or in-flight integration work with the Foundation will be contacted directly. We will do our best to hand off relationships gracefully, to community members or Block Producer teams where appropriate.

A Word of Thanks

We extend our sincere thanks to every integration partner, Block Producer, token holder, community member, and contributor who believed in the mission of making blockchain usable for everyone. Special thanks to our early supporters, including Binance Labs, who led the Foundation’s Series A funding.

The code is open-sourced. The chain is running. The community that built it moves forward. The FIO Protocol endures.

— The FIO Foundation

A New Chapter for FIO: The Protocol Transitions to Community Stewardship was originally published in FIO Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.