Collection

Governance

How a change to the protocol actually ships, who can stop it, and where the issuance goes. The part of the protocol that is people.

11 entries 125 min to read through intermediate
01

How change ships

  1. How a change to the protocol actually ships A GIP is a proposal. A GGP is a vote. Knowing the difference lets you tell a discussion from a decision, which is most of reading this ecosystem accurately. 11 min
02

Decisions

  1. The road to Horizon, and the fork not taken Horizon took almost two years and began three years before it shipped. The most consequential decision in it was not what to build but how to get there, and the Council chose the harder option. 12 min
  2. The proposal that would have abolished curation GIP-0058 proposed replacing curation entirely with indexing fees. It was written, amended, argued over and withdrawn. Reading a rejected proposal tells you more than reading an accepted one. 12 min
  3. How to read a GIP There are 85 of them and they are the best documentation this protocol has. Four fields and one section tell you most of what you need before reading a word of the specification. 9 min
03

Who decides

  1. The Council, the Foundation, and grants Two distinct bodies with distinct jobs, which people conflate constantly. One votes on protocol changes. The other holds and deploys money. 11 min
  2. What the governance record does and does not show Two routes a decision can take, and only one of them leaves something you can read afterwards. Which route is chosen before anybody knows the outcome. 10 min
04

Disputes

  1. Arbitration and disputes The part of the protocol where correctness is enforced by people rather than by code, why it has to be, and what that costs. 10 min
05

The money

  1. Tokenomics: issuance, burns, and where it just moved Three percent issuance, several burns, and a twenty percent redirect that is now flowing. The arithmetic of who pays for the network to exist. 13 min
  2. The new mandate, and what the issuance buys A fifth of protocol issuance is being redirected to fund a change in what the Foundation does. What was published, what was only presented, and how to tell. 11 min
  3. Project Catalyst: the eight workstreams The work the redirected issuance is meant to fund, item by item, and the pattern in what is actually blocking each one. 14 min
06

Practicum

  1. Following a proposal end to end Follow one real proposal from written argument to deployed behaviour, and form your own view on it. 12 min

Elsewhere

This collection explains why. Two other places carry the rest.

The procedure GIP repository Exact steps, flags and configuration, maintained by the people who ship the code. This site does not duplicate them and never will. The live numbers Network state on Lodestar Nothing here updates on its own. Live stake, signal, fees and indexer performance come from a dashboard reading the network.