Notice: If you have voted with conviction for Referendum 52, you can lower it any time until the end of the vote (Friday May 15 at 1pm CEST), as it’s non-binding and will result in your KSM being locked. Setting conviction to 0.1x will result in a no lockup period.

This is a proposal to change the denomination of DOT in the Polkadot chain specification. The redenomination will be a proportional increase of allocated DOTs by a factor of 100.

In brief the proposal has the following four effects:

• The total allocations of DOTs will increase one hundred times from 10 million to 1 billion.
• DOT allocation balances will increase by a factor of one hundred, such that 1 DOT will be 100 DOTs.
• The distribution of DOTs does not change, and holders of DOTs still own an equal share of the network as before the change.
• The precision of DOT will change from 12 decimal places to 10 decimal places.

The main benefit of this change is to avoid using small decimals when dealing with DOT and to achieve an easier calculation system.

What does this proposal change?

The proposal is a change to what magnitude of units is considered the DOT, and does not imply any technical consequences. The lowest unit of the DOT, the Planck, does not change. Rather it is the number of Plancks that make up one DOT that does.

Let's consider how many Plancks constitute a single DOT before the change. Since DOT has 12 decimal places, it would be:

1,000,000,000,000 Plancks = 1 DOT

All DOT allocation holders will keep the same number of Plancks after this change, however where the decimal is being placed will be moved:

   Before the change the decimal was here
   v
  1.000000000000 DOT
   
  100.0000000000 DOT
     ^
     After the change the decimal will be here

This decimal move means that:

10,000,000,000 Plancks = 1 DOT

This change does not modify the overall allocation of DOTs at the Planck level, and the network share of individual holdings remains exactly the same.

It does change the fractional divisibility of the DOT from twelve decimal place to ten decimal places.

In the most basic terms, the proposal is only to change what is called a "DOT".

What is the system remark?

The system remark is the utf-8 encoding of the first two sentences of this document.

EDIT:

There was some confusion about what this means for participants in the Polkadot ICO and whether this is some kind of inflationary or deflationary proposal. In short, it is not suggesting an inflation or deflation of token supply. It is suggesting a proportional increase of the denomination of DOT so that 1 DOT from the Polkadot ICO will be 100 DOTs when Polkadot goes live. The increase applies to every DOT allocation balance so every balance will be increased in the same proportion. The way this is applied is through a change to the front-end by moving the decimal of the DOT two places to the right (as shown above). In other words it is a change to the social consensus of what order of magnitude we call the "DOT."