Overview
The key design approach for the Governance Process is to keep it fast, nimble, and efficient. While there will be off-chain elements (e.g., Snapshot voting), we think this is a good tradeoff in the short to medium term. The community can propose to adjust the process in the future as the protocol becomes more mature.
Process
Making any formal changes to the protocol via the Governance Proposal Process will have 4 key steps:
Step 1 - Community Discussion and Feedback:
Any community members can post ideas, topics for discussions, and feedback on our Forum, which will be hosted on Discourse. You are not required to hold any HMX token to join the Forum or create a post. The forum will be monitored and moderated to ensure civil, respectful, and relevant discussions.
While any topics can be posted or suggested, in the beginning, we believe the type of discussions that will be most beneficial to the protocol will fall into these categories:
- New Product and Feature Suggestions
- Partnership and Integration
- Protocol Parameter Adjustments
- Strategic Initiatives (Utilization of POL)
- Others
Please refer to the post here on how to write an effective proposal.
Step 2 - HMX Improvement Proposal (HIP):
Discussion topics that gather enough attention and interest from the community and deemed appropriate by the council members will be moved into the next step, which is the HIP. In this step, community members will have a chance to discuss and provide more feedback before it goes into voting.
You may ask, what and who are these council members?
To keep the initial governance activity clean (no harmful proposals) and streamlined, we will elect 5 council members who will serve a 1-year term, and will need to be re-elected each year. Their jobs are to evaluate discussion topics and decide whether they would go to a vote.
Step 3 - Voting:
Voting will be conducted off-chain on Snapshot. Users will get 1 voting power for each staked HMX and esHMX.
- Vesting esHMX does not get a voting power
- Unlocking HMX does not get a voting power
To ensure high participation and from the community and efficiency, we are implementing the following voting mechanics
- Each proposal will run for at least 72 hours to give ample time for voting
- Encrypted Voting where the voting scores are only revealed after the voting period has ended
- User can vote for, against, or abstain on a proposal
- A proposal must meet a minimum quorum number to be valid. Initially, we will use 150,000 HMX as the quorum amount.
Step 4 - Implementation:
After a successful proposal, the HMX team will implement any changes required on-chain.