Parachain Emergency Recovery
Hosts: William Freudenberger, Albrecht Weiche
Team Name: KILT
Since the launch of parachains, numerous Dotsama teams required relay governance to unblock their parachain by overwriting the current WASM. It is clear that no project hopes to ever be in that boat but unfortunately humans make errors.
According to the guidelines of the relay Technical Committee, it would not fast track the recovery of an inoperative parachain if it does neither concern relay chain security nor has funds at risk. As a result, a parachain can expect to only recover via the relay’s public referendum queue. In the case of Governance 1.0 and Polkadot we are talking about 8 weeks minimum until the para’s salvation referendum would be executed on the relay chain. It is not unlikely that a project might suffer damage on the scale of extinction before that time.
Of course, Governance 2.0 could theoretically expedite this process. However, the majority of relay users might not care about that specific frozen parachain such that the confirmation period would not be reached in orders of magnitude quicker compared to the current Governance 1.0. Moreover, the Fellowship would not whitelist the referendum either, based on the above assumption.
In the end, every parachain should have the possibility of executing an emergency recovery on the relay chain. The strength of the Polkadot ecosystem lies in the collective of all projects and thus it can be drawn down by a single one as well.
We would like to open a panel discussion about the topic and propose one possible solution which uses XCM for parachains to opt in to the recovery by replicating their Council with a single purpose power on the relay chain.
Possible topics covered:
- Recap of current relay Governance 1.0 process to fix halted parachains
- Governance 2.0
- XCM