Representative Voting¶

Representatives are the backbone of Kakitu's consensus mechanism. They hold delegated voting weight from other accounts and vote on the validity of transactions.

Overview¶

In Kakitu's Open Representative Voting (ORV) system:

Account holders delegate their balance to a representative address
When a transaction is broadcast, representatives vote on it
Once votes exceeding 67% of online voting weight are collected, the transaction is confirmed
Voting costs nothing — no staking, no lockup, no fees

Any node with delegated voting weight can participate. Nodes holding at least 0.1% of online voting weight become Principal Representatives — their votes are rebroadcast across the network, giving them direct influence over confirmation speed.

Prerequisites¶

Before enabling voting:

Your node must be fully synced with the network
Your representative account (kshs_ address) must have KSHS delegated to it by other accounts
Your node must have reliable uptime — votes missed during downtime affect confirmation times

Enabling Voting¶

Edit config-node.toml:

[node]
enable_voting = true

# Your representative's kshs_ address
# This should match the account whose private key is in your wallet
representative = "kshs_YOUR_REPRESENTATIVE_ADDRESS"

Or use command-line override:

kakitu_node daemon --network=live --config node.enable_voting=true

Checking Voting Status¶

curl -s -d '{"action":"confirmation_quorum"}' http://localhost:7076

{
  "quorum_delta": "67000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "online_weight_minimum": "60000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "online_weight_quorum_percent": "67",
  "online_stake_total": "95000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "peers_stake_total": "90000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "trended_stake_total": "92000000000000000000000000000000000000"
}

Checking Your Voting Weight¶

curl -s -d '{
  "action": "representatives",
  "count": "100",
  "sorting": "true"
}' http://localhost:7076

Find your representative's address in the returned list to see your delegated weight.

Delegating to Your Representative¶

To encourage others to delegate to your representative, share your kshs_ representative address publicly. Account holders can change their representative with:

curl -s -d '{
  "action": "account_representative_set",
  "wallet": "THEIR_WALLET_ID",
  "account": "kshs_THEIR_ACCOUNT",
  "representative": "kshs_YOUR_REPRESENTATIVE_ADDRESS"
}' http://localhost:7076

This creates a change block on their account chain — it's a free, instant operation.

Principal Representative Threshold¶

To become a Principal Representative (PR) and have your votes rebroadcast by peers, you need at least 0.1% of online voting weight delegated to your representative address.

Monitor your progress:

curl -s -d '{
  "action": "account_info",
  "account": "kshs_YOUR_REPRESENTATIVE_ADDRESS",
  "representative": "true"
}' http://localhost:7076

Uptime Requirements¶

Representative nodes should maintain as close to 100% uptime as possible. When a representative goes offline:

Their delegated weight is removed from the online voting weight calculation
This reduces the quorum delta, potentially slowing confirmations
Persistent offline PRs may be filtered by the network's online weight tracking

Use a process manager (systemd, Docker --restart=always) and set up uptime monitoring with alerts. See Monitoring.

Voting Weight Delegation Best Practices¶

Encourage users of your service to delegate their KSHS to your representative
Publish your representative address on your website and in community channels
Maintain transparency about your node's uptime and infrastructure
Consider running a redundant node in a different region for failover