CIP-1694 Breakdown: Governance Actions

Governance General Governance Conversation
1

The following is a breakdown summary of the currently proposed “Governance Actions” part of CIP-1694. The current design is still subject to change. We will keep the text current and make any necessary updates in the event of any changes to CIP-1694.

Currently, seven different governance actions have been proposed to be executable on the blockchain. Any ada holder can submit these actions simply by submitting a transaction.

These governance actions have specific deadlines, defined as future epochs, by which they must be enacted, or they will be dropped. For a governance action to be ratified, the relevant stakeholders must vote.

If voting thresholds are not met before the deadline, the governance action expires and is automatically dropped. They can also be dropped without being enacted if a motion of no-confidence in the current Constitutional Committee is passed.

There are seven different sorts of governance actions proposed. These are:

1. Motion of no-confidence [in the current Constitutional Committee]
2. New Constitutional Committee and/or quorum size
3. Updates to the Constitution
4. Hard-Fork Initiation
5. Protocol Parameter Changes
6. Treasury Withdrawals
7. Info

As stated before, one of the core principles of on-chain governance and CIP-1694 is that any ada holder has to be able to submit a governance action. To avoid spamming the network, ada holders must deposit a fixed amount of ada when submitting a governance action on-chain. The deposit will be returned immediately when a ratified action is enacted, the action expires, or a ratified action is dropped.

Governance actions will count as being ratified after passing through an on-chain voting process. Different governance actions have other approval/ratification requirements, such as approval by the Constitutional Committee, DReps, and SPOs. For a breakdown of the mentioned distinct groups, read here.

It is currently proposed that no more than one of the seven governance action types can be staged for enactment in any given epoch. As a drastic measure, DReps and SPOs can pass a motion of no-confidence in the current Constitutional Committee. Thereby dissolving the Constitutional Committee and forcing the creation of a new one. As the committee enters a state of no-confidence, all prior actions that have not been enacted (whether or not they have been ratified) are immediately dropped/canceled.

A special thank you to @dennyb2010 & @adatainment for contributing to this text.

4 Likes
2

Interesting document
For your information, the two reference articles for this
Shelley ledger specification.
and
Alonzo ledger specification
are broken.

1 Like
3

Is probably a temporary problem but I have been hosting the latest version of the Shelley design specification for delegation and incentives on https://www.adatainment.com/_downloads/docs/delegation_design_spec.pdf, in case you need it.

4

I don’t think so. What I have read in IOG’s Discord is that the company that used to host hydra.iohk.io has terminated the contract rather suddenly. The domain is obviously still IOG’s, but I doubt that if they set it up again somewhere else, it will have the same server structure.

5

I don’t want to get too off-topic, but that’s what the internet has created redirects for. :)) These docs are linked so often that it would be a shame not to fix that.

1 Like
6

You are right that would be the right rhing to do, but even entities that are usually much more organised unfortunately do not always do it.

Let’s set a reminder to tease them, when they host the documents again somewhere.