Tron Governance: How to Vote Using TRX

By Decrypt Staff

Tron uses a delegated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to secure its network. Every six hours, 27 elected delegates, known as "super representatives," are voted in by the Tron community to generate blocks and validate transactions.

That means that the community of TRX holders has a meaningful role in determining the governance of the Tron network. Here's how to participate.

How do you vote on Tron?

Any Tron account can vote for a super representative as long as they have a Tron wallet with some TRX in it.

Account holders are required to stake TRX to vote; it’s impossible to vote without staking. You can get voting rights by “freezing” your TRX for three days, during which time you can’t access those funds.

After 72 hours, the frozen TRX becomes liquid again—this is referred to as “Tron Power”—and can be used to vote in super representative elections.

Each TRX you stake equals one vote.

You can freeze your TRX and get voting rights directly within a software wallet such as TronLink, or connect your wallet to Tronscan, Tron’s primary blockchain explorer. Tronscan supports both software wallets and hardware wallets such as Ledger.

Who are the super representative candidates?

Any Tron account can submit an application to become a super representative candidate by paying 9,999 TRX.

The top 27 candidates with the most votes are elected to become super representatives until the next round of voting begins. The counting process takes place every six hours, and representatives are automatically replaced based on the results.

Elections are held frequently so that no single super representative has an opportunity to gain too much control over the network.

What should you look for when voting?

Accounts that represent reputable and trustworthy organizations are your best bet. It’s also worth checking out a candidate’s stake rate, whether they’ve sponsored projects to increase TRX adoption, and the volume of rewards they previously distributed to voters if they’ve been a super representative in the past.

You can find out more about super representative candidates by searching on Tronscan.

How are staking rewards distributed?

Super representatives generally distribute a portion of the rewards they earn for producing blocks back to the accounts that voted for them. The amount can vary, though.

Tron sets the default ratio that a super representative gets at 20% of the total reward, with the other 80% to be awarded to their voters. But voters should be aware that it’s ultimately up to the super representative to set the final ratio.

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