Voltaire Update: Changes to CIP-1694
On 4 August 2023, a pull request was submitted to CIP-1694 with some semantic changes, clean-ups from previous changes, and implementation of ideas that came up during the Edinburgh workshop on 11-12 July 2023. Here is an overview of the changes:
- The governance action to update the Constitution now also includes a proposal policy. A proposal policy is a script that can control what treasury withdrawals and protocol parameter changes are allowed. This script is an additional failsafe to the constitutional committee that restricts some proposal types. This can be immensely useful for the community, especially if they wish to implement “hard” rules for treasury withdrawals.
- Remove the dropping of governance actions. The only effect this has is that actions stay around if a no-confidence action passes. However, only new committee proposals that build on top of that no-confidence action can be enacted. If a new committee gets elected while some of those actions haven’t expired, they can be ratified, but the new committee has to approve them.
- All governance actions are enacted one epoch after they are ratified.
- Move post-bootstrapping restrictions into the “Other Ideas” section. These restrictions include the implementation of a temporary safety measure even after the bootstrap phase has ended due to the foreseeable low voter turnout. The idea is only to consider the top X-DReps ranked by stake amount or those DReps with a least Y lovelaces. As the epochs progress, X will increase, and Y will decrease. Ultimately X will be effectively infinite, and Y will be zero.
- Add a section on different deposit amounts to “Other Ideas.” The outcome of many workshops was that attendees thought having different deposit amounts for the governance action types would be beneficial.
- Add a section for a minimum Active Voting Stake (AVS) to “Other Ideas.” This is the idea of introducing a fixed amount of stake that has to cast a “Yes” vote on an action for it to be enacted.
- Rename some protocol parameters, such as minimal constitutional committee size (ccMinSize) or governance action maximum lifetime in epochs (govActionLifetime)
- Turn the Constitution into an anchor. An anchor is a pair of a URL to a JSON payload of metadata and a hash of the contents of the metadata URL.
- Rework which anchors are required and which are optional.
I will continue to monitor and update you about the developments of CIP-1694, its ratification process, and every other news item about the Age of Voltaire.