The community treasury's role is to handle QNT payments flowing from users to the gateways in such a way as to disincentivise faulty behaviour from any user or gateway, and to do so in a manner where it can be held accountable to any observer.
The white paper (found here) describes aspects of the Overledger Network, discusses the community treasury's role in handling payments between users and gateways using layer 2 unidirectional payment channels; and details how the community treasury enforces rules between the users and gateways, known as payment contracts, which dis-incentivises faulty behaviour using a game theoretic model. Using payment channels allows QNT transfers between users and gateways following through the community treasury to be quick, significantly reduce their Ether fees and be publicly verifiable upon channel settlement. Additionally, the implementation of these payment contracts will be a breakthrough for the distributed ledger domain. With payment contracts, users not running a distributed ledger node can ask multiple gateways to perform a request where the responses will be compared for verification purposes. Therefore, not only do distributed ledger networks provide a method to establish trust between different parties running different nodes, but the Overledger Network will provide a method to establish trust between users not running a node and parties running nodes.
The first version of the community treasury code has now been released, please see the Code folder. There is further information in the readme file of that folder.
Feedback is welcome. Please direct general comments to [email protected] or for github improvement suggestions open a pull request.