Governance V2

Polkadot employs a sophisticated governance mechanism that allows it to elegantly evolve according to the wishes of its stakeholders. Its aim is to ensure that a majority of stakeholders can always control the network.

Polkadot's first decentralized governance system ( v1) consists of three main components: the Technical Committee, the Council, and the Voting System. The system performed well in its early days, but requires further improvements over time. Thus, "Governance v2" was born.

"Governance v2" or "Gov2" changes the way daily decisions are made, broadening and accelerating the impact of referendums, thereby significantly increasing the number of collective decisions the system can make.

Gov2 has been launched on the Kusama network for testing, and a proposal will be submitted for deployment to Polkadot afterwards.

mechanism

In Governance v1, active token holders and the council jointly manage network upgrade decisions. All proposals must ultimately go through a public referendum, with decisions made based on the amount of staked tokens and the faith value as weights.

There are several changes in Governance v2:

• Transfer all responsibilities of the council to token holders through democratic voting.
• Dissolve the current board of directors collectively
• Allow users to delegate voting rights to community members in more ways

referendum

A referendum is a simple, inclusive, stake-based voting scheme. Each referendum has a specific proposal that takes the form of a runtime privilege function call.

In Gov2, anyone can initiate a referendum at any time, and there is no limit on the number. Gov2 introduces the new concepts of Origins( and Tracks) to help manage the referendum process.

Origin can be seen as a descriptor for a given privilege level. Proposers need to choose the appropriate Origin based on the requirements of the proposal.

Each Origin is associated with a referendum category, and each category has a corresponding Track. The Track outlines the lifecycle of the proposal and is independent of the Tracks of other categories. This allows the network to adjust the dynamics of the referendum based on the privilege level of the proposal.

( Proposal Referendum

In Gov2, once a referendum is created, the community can immediately vote on it. However, the referendum must meet certain criteria to enter the "Deciding)Deciding###" state, including:

• Experience Import Period
• There is remaining decision space
• Payment determines the deposit

A referendum must meet the approval and support rate requirements within the confirmation period to be passed. Different tracks have different confirmation periods and approval/support requirements.

( voluntary lock-up

Polkadot uses the concept of "voluntary locking" to allow token holders to increase their voting power by locking their tokens. The longer the locking period, the greater the voting weight, with a maximum locking period of 32 epochs, which is approximately 2.5 years.

) Polkadot Fellowship

Gov2 introduces the Polkadot Fellowship to replace the Technical Committee. The Fellowship is a fundamentally autonomous expert institution that represents individuals with knowledge of the Polkadot network and protocol technologies. It classifies members through a "tier" system.

Fellowship members can vote on any Fellowship proposal, and their aggregated opinions ### are weighted by rank ( to form the consideration opinions of the Fellowship.

) whitelist and blacklist

The whitelist allows Fellowship to authorize certain operations to be executed with Root level permissions. The blacklist can blacklist certain proposals through Root sources, preventing them from reappearing in the proposal queue.

The introduction of Governance V2 has made Polkadot's governance system more decentralized and flexible, laying the foundation for the long-term development of the network.