CIP-13: Mainnet On-chain Governance Parameters

Discussions for CIP-13: On-chain governance parameters for Celestia Mainnet

Hey! Sorry I missed the call today.

I think I generally have some confusion about what governance exists on-chain for Celestia vs not. Most of the explanations I’ve heard from core team members and the docs I’ve read suggest that governance is fully off chain.

But this doc indicates that some parameters are changeable by governance. If governance is implemented by “rough consensus” off chain, what does it mean that some parameters are changeable by governance and others are not. Presumably off-chain governance can do whatever it wants by hard forking.

Sorry for my general ignorance here!

The CIP here lists all “on-chain” governance parameters that are in the protocol. Those require coin-weighted voting to change.

Over time, the core devs do plan to phase out some of the “on-chain” governance parameters. The reason they’re mentioned in this CIP is just as a reference point in the CIP process on what “on-chain” governance parameters are active on Mainnet and what their values are.

Governance still happens in Celestia Core Devs Call which is off-chain for any parameters that impact the core protocol, and that includes on-chain governance parameters. Submitting an on-chain governance proposal after that to modify the value of the param can happen after rough consensus is reached in the CDC which is more of a formality.

Let me know if this answers your question

Well, let’s see where we go from here… Quote a good number of folks had a good notion on how this would play out before now… Thanks for bringing out to our notice…
At least we know there’s on-chain effect on voting now…

Yazanator:

Over time, the core devs do plan to phase out some of the “on-chain” governance parameters.

I agree with the direction of this. Currently, we’re in an awkward position where the decisions made by on-chain governance may not reflect the decisions made via off-chain rough consensus.