"GovHub" System Chain: voting and treasury management for assets on AssetHub

Tech Talk
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Eventually OpenGov moves off Polkadot Relay…

Over time, as polkadot relay chain simplifies itself to providing purely security for the network, it is in the backlog of tasks for OpenGov to be moved off-chain to an OpenGov system chain where referendums and voting would be handled from there. The status of this may not be an urgent priority.

Assets need governance too

However it would be useful to create a system parachain that enables OpenGov (or OpenGov like) quality treasury management for projects that do not need a parachain… such as a assets on AssetHub.

These are projects that require sovereignty of their assets but not of their infrastructure. So no runtime upgrades, just coordination of their assets.

Some assets on AH have a pot of funds, such as a treasury. It is currently a big challenge for this treasury to be managed which allows ALL the holders of the asset to vote on proposals.

Partial voting possible, but not “full”?

Partial voting is possible through a multisig or DAO, but not full voting, to my knowledge. How can we enable full voting? Are there any non-system parachains that offer this solution for full voting? Or there any solutions to this that i am missing?

Sooner rather than later…

Besides… the fact that OpenGov will eventually be moved away it makes sense to start that process sooner rather than later based on the governance it would afford for assets, etc.

Use Case

DED token will be an AH asset that takes a snapshot of all accessible balances of DOT, inlcuding DOTs treasury. There will be a large account of DED that is only accessible through Polkadot’s OpenGov.

In the near term, DOT holders can vote with DOT on OpenGov to handle treasury funds of the DED asset. But soon after the DOT holders may desire to cut the umbilical chord, and allow DED holders to vote on their own affairs by handling their own treasury and some other root privileges related to their asset (like forceCreate, etc.) to potentially mint new tokens if that is what is required.

Solution

OpenGov system chain (or some kind of “GovHub”), which can be slightly less sophisticated than open gov (initially) can be a place for asset based projects (and even parachains) to handle the governance.

There is probably similar conversations about this in various channels (apologies i haven’t done a lot of research to find all the previous conversations about this topic), so it would be useful links to those conversations in the comments below,…

Feedback/comments

it would be good to get thoughts on this?

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The idea itself is useful but has nothing to do with OpenGov. Yes we are working on moving OpenGov from the Relay Chain and into a system parachain (almost certainly the existing Collectives chain). But OpenGov is about governing Polkadot, and you want something to govern assets. Which is cool, but mixing this with OpenGov is just making everything more complicated.

Most of the components that you need to realize this are more-or-less there already. Assets already have a set of privileged accounts that can mint, burn, force transfer, etc. Rather than setting these accounts to arbitrary parties, you want the holders of the asset to control some or all of those accounts.

Well, you can derive accounts of relative locations using XCM. (In fact, if you look at the privileged accounts for wrapped KSM on Polkadot, it’s the address corresponding to Kusama’s governance location).

So you need another location in the network that will (a) accept your asset from Asset Hub, and (b) provide an implementation of some voting/governance system. I think a lot of existing parachains already meet (a) and I’m sure some out there meet (b). At least I hope there are some parachains that allow DAO formation with either customizable or configurable voting logic.

Then you just need to set the privileged accounts to the address corresponding to this logic, et voilà, you will have what you need. No, it’s not via a system parachain, but it could also be from a “neutral” parachain. Coretime makes this much more reasonable since there is no upfront cost of an auction. You could make a very basic chain that only uses DOT (and in fact charge people a fee in DOT to instantiate some logic for their asset’s governance) and buys coretime in DOT and only executes a block when there is some governance proposal up for vote for an asset. Actually the asset that wants to hold a vote at any given time can provide the DOT / coretime credits to execute the blocks.

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Thanks for the response. I really like the idea of the coretime use case to enable full voting governance for holders of assets on AssetHub.

(a) accept your asset from Asset Hub, and (b) provide an implementation of some voting/governance system. I think a lot of existing parachains already meet (a) and I’m sure some out there meet (b). At least I hope there are some parachains that allow DAO formation with either customizable or configurable voting logic.

if a DAO can be configurable to any holder of an Asset as a member, then that would be sufficient to enable full voting. Then the execution of the vote would need to somehow be configured so that the DAO has the admin privileges to make changes to the asset.

Then you just need to set the privileged accounts to the address corresponding to this logic, et voilà, you will have what you need.

ok i see that is what you went on to say ^^

Coretime makes this much more reasonable since there is no upfront cost of an auction. You could make a very basic chain that only uses DOT

But if a parachain supports a) and b) then asset holders dont need to build a chain and use Coretime. However a Coretime chain specifically for governance of asset holders may be useful…