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Network Governance

This document is meant to serve as a general guide to network governance for the Althea L1 community.

Governance Essentials

Community governance is an essential tool for blockchains within the Cosmos ecosystem and enables stakeholders to directly participate in the decisions that affect blockchain operation.

Anyone may participate in governance by creating and submitting their own proposals and any stakeholder—i.e. anyone staking the $ALTHEA token—can vote on live proposals. Governance proposals are used to make changes to code or procedure, utilize community funds, and generally find consensus on questions facing the network.

Anyone wishing to participate in community governance, beyond merely voting on the proposals of others, should familiarize themselves with the different proposal types as well as the recommended best practices regarding governance. These practices are meant to ensure improved visibility, transparency and discourse regarding network governance.

Althea L1 Governance Guidelines

To maximize transparency, visibility and further thoughtful discussion, the following guidelines are strongly encouraged. These guidelines are meant to help you be more successful when engaging with the community through governance.

Before creating an on-chain proposal, first create a login and make a new post in the governance category of the Althea L1 forum (https://forum.altheamesh.com/). Your post should summarize your proposal, its intended effect, include any relevant pros or cons, as well as any other information that will help community members better understand the proposal, intended goals, and the impact it will have if passed (or defeated). You are encouraged to respectfully engage with other community members in the forum who may voice support, opposition or who ask for further information or clarification.

To increase visibility of the forum discussion you have just started, please visit the #governance channel of the official Althea Discord server and share a link to your post and a brief description of your proposal.

Allow sufficient time for discussion to take place before creating an on-chain proposal. There is no hard rule on how long one should allow, as this will vary depending on the nature of the proposal. Generally speaking, one week is typically sufficient time for a beneficial discussion to take place. The goal during this time should be to raise awareness, gauge sentiment, and share knowledge. Even good proposals are made better through suggestions and input from other members. Thorough discussion produces governance that is far more likely to pass and far less likely to require subsequent proposals to correct oversights or errors.

Voting on Proposals

After your proposal has been vetted, it is ready to be turned into an active on-chain proposal, which will allow stakeholders and validators to cast their votes.

Voting weight

The voting power is determined by stake-weight (the amount of tokens a user has staked) at the end of the voting period and is proportional to the number of total $ALTHEA tokens participating in the vote. $ALTHEA tokens must be staked to count in the voting process. Any liquid tokens you may have are not counted toward a vote or quorum.

While both active (top 75 validators by stake-weight) validators and inactive (validators below 75 threshold) validators may cast votes, inactive validators voting power will not count towards the final vote. For this reason, it is important to confirm whether or not the validator you have delegated to is currently in the active set, because your stake-weight may not be counted towards the vote if they are not.

Voting Options

Yes (yes) Cast a vote in favor of the proposal.

No (no) Casts a vote against the proposal.

No with veto (no_with_veto) Casts a vote against the proposal and advocates that the deposit for the proposal be forfeited. This option should only be used when you feel a proposal was made in bad faith, to discourage bad-faith actors.

PLEASE NOTE: Even though a simple majority of 50% or greater is required, a minority group with just 33.4% or 1/3rd of the voting power can fail a proposal that would otherwise pass by voting no-with-veto. You may wish to view the status of the vote using a block explorer to view the percentage of vote types cast, in order to gain a good understanding of whether a proposal will be vetoed and have its deposit burned. The veto option should be used against proposals that are made in bad faith, to discourage malicious proposals. If a proposal is made in good faith, but you do not agree with it, a simple no vote will suffice.

Casting your Vote

For more in depth instructions, please see the voting section of the Althea L1 Basics doc.

Voting with Metamask

Navigate to Althea L1 governance page
Click on an active proposal
Click on YES, NO, or NO WITH VETO
Confirm the transaction with Metamask

Voting via CLI

To vote via the CLI, you will need to first know the number of the proposal that you wish to vote on. Once you have this information, and assuming you have the Althea binary installed you can vote with the following command:

althea tx gov vote PROPOSAL_NUMBER <yes/no/no_with_veto> \
--chain-id CURRENT_CHAIN-ID \
--fees 35000000000000000aalthea \
--gas 350000 \
--from YOUR_KEYNAME \

Deposit

Deposit Amount

When a new proposal is created, in order for the proposal to go on-chain for voting, a deposit must be put down. This ensures that the proposal is created in good faith. If a majority of voters conclude the proposal was made in bad faith, the deposit will be forfeited. The deposit amount parameter sets the size of the deposit required to create an on-chain proposal, and can be adjusted through governance.

The current deposit amount is 500 $ALTHEA.

A proposal deposit can be funded from one wallet or many wallets. The creator of the proposal is not required to fund the deposit. Anyone with $ALTHEA in their wallet can fund a proposal deposit during the deposit period.

Deposit Period

Proposals can be created without funding the deposit, but they will be ineligible for public voting until the full deposit amount is met. The period between proposal creation and the deposit being fully funded is the deposit period, and the parameter is referred to as the max deposit period.

The current deposit period is 24 hours.

If the deposit is met during the deposit period, the proposal will be automatically rejected.

Note: If the deposit amount is not reached before the deposit period elapses, any partial deposits made will be lost when the unfunded proposal is automatically rejected.

Losing/Forfeiting Deposits

Generally speaking, the deposit will be returned to their originating wallets after voting has concluded (i.e. after the voting period—currently 3 days—has elapsed). There are however exceptions when the deposit will be lost/forfeited. You should be mindful of the following conditions which will cause the user deposits will to lost:

1) If the deposit period elapses before reaching the minimum deposit, any partial deposits that have been made will be forfeited.

2) If a proposal fails to reach quorum (i.e. 33.4% or more of staked $ALTHEA did not vote) deposits are forfeited.

3) If a proposal is vetoed (i.e. 33.4% of the voting power chooses the “no-with-veto” option) all deposits will be forfeited.

Raising Awareness

All new on-chain proposals should be posted/shared in the #Governance channel of the Althea L1 Discord server, the Althea forum (in the governance category), social media, or anywhere else you feel is conducive to raising awareness of your proposal. This will ensure maximum visibility and voting participation.

Governance Parameters and terms

A thorough breakdown of the various standard governance parameters (i.e. governance-related parameters that can be changed through governance), can be found in the official Cosmos SDK documentation.

Implementation

Assuming a proposal passes, the final step in its journey is implementation. This can include a distribution of allotted funds, a scheduled upgrade, a change in voting parameters, or a change/update in the codebase, or other change. The time and nature of the proposal’s implementation will vary depending on the type of proposal.

Proposal Creation

Currently proposals must be submitted via the CLI. If you do not run a validator and do not have the Althea binary installed locally, you can engage with the community to accomplish this step.

Proposal Commands

The CLI command to create a proposal:

althea tx gov submit-proposal \
--title "PROPOSAL TITLE" \
--description "DESCRIPTION OF PROPOSAL" \
--type PROPOSAL_TYPE \
--deposit 10000000000000000000aalthea \
--from YOUR_KEYNAME \
--fees 30000000000000000aalthea \
--gas 350000 \
--chain-id=CURRENT_CHAIN-ID

Note in this example, the deposit has been paid in full from the wallet that created the proposal. If you do not include the deposit, the proposal will be created but not funded (see: Deposit).

Proposal Types (standard)

TEXT (submit a text proposal)
param-change (submit a parameter change proposal)
Software-upgrade (Submit a software upgrade proposal)
community-pool-spend (Submit a community pool spend proposal)
ibc-upgrade (submit an IBC upgrade proposal)
update-client (Submit an update IBC client proposal)