An extension to the ERC20 standard with methods for time-locking of tokens within a contract.
This proposal provides basic functionality to time-lock tokens within an ERC20 smart contract for multiple utilities without the need of transferring tokens to an external escrow smart contract. It also allows fetching balance of locked and transferable tokens.
Time-locking can also be achieved via staking (#900), but that requires transfer of tokens to an escrow contract / stake manager, resulting in the following six concerns:
dApps often require tokens to be time-locked against transfers for letting members 1) adhere to vesting schedules and 2) show skin in the game to comply with the underlying business process. I realized this need while building Nexus Mutual and GovBlocks.
In Nexus Mutual, claim assessors are required to lock their tokens before passing a vote for claims assessment. This is important as it ensures assessors’ skin in the game. The need here was that once a claim assessor locks his tokens for ‘n’ days, he should be able to cast multiple votes during that period of ‘n’ days, which is not feasible with staking mechanism. There are other scenarios like skills/identity verification or participation in gamified token curated registries where time-locked tokens are required as well.
In GovBlocks, I wanted to allow dApps to lock member tokens for governance, while still allowing members to use those locked tokens for other activities within the dApp business. This is also the case with DGX governance model where they’ve proposed quarterly token locking for participation in governance activities of DGX.
In addition to locking functionality, I have proposed a Lock() and Unlock() event, just like the Transfer() event , to track token lock and unlock status. From token holder’s perspective, it gets tough to manage token holdings if certain tokens are transferred to another account for locking, because whenever balanceOf() queries are triggered on token holder’s account – the result does not include locked tokens. A totalBalanceOf() function intends to solve this problem.
The intention with this proposal is to enhance the ERC20 standard with token-locking capability so that dApps can time-lock tokens of the members without having to transfer tokens to an escrow / stake manager and at the same time allow members to use the locked tokens for multiple utilities.
I’ve extended the ERC20 interface with the following enhancements:
event Locked(address indexed _of, uint256 indexed _reason, uint256 _amount, uint256 _validity)
event Unlocked(address indexed _of, uint256 indexed _reason, uint256 _amount)
Test cases are available at https://github.com/nitika-goel/lockable-token.
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.