Hi all, Sergei from Robonomics, a parachain on Polkadot for IoT and cyber-physical systems. This follows our Tech Talk thread on Robonomics 5.0, part one (the runtime-only repo on polkadot-omni-node).
Runtime 50 is now live on Polkadot, and the next step of our 5.0 roadmap is governance. Today every privileged action on Robonomics goes through Sudo, held by a developer multisig. The network is in early production now, and a cloud for IoT that calls itself open can’t be steered by a developer key. So in version 5.1 we replace Sudo with standard OpenGov.
What we ship. pallet-referenda, pallet-conviction-voting, pallet-whitelist, pallet-preimage and pallet-scheduler, stock Polkadot SDK, benchmarked. We keep the mechanism and drop most of the structure around it: no Council, no Fellowship, no treasury tracks. Two tracks only:
| Track | Decision | Approval | Support | Deciding at once |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Root | up to 14 days | 90% → 51% | 50% → 15% | 1 |
| Whitelisted Caller | up to 3 days | 99% → 80% | 2% → 1% | 10 |
Anyone can open a Root referendum, and XRT holders vote with conviction (1x for 7 days up to 6x for 224 days). The fast track is for reviewed technical fixes: a core-team collective of up to 7 members, with half of them agreeing, can whitelist the hash of one exact call. That executes nothing by itself. The call still needs a public referendum with at least 1% of all XRT voting aye.
Handover in two steps. First the pallets ship while the multisig keeps Sudo as a safety net. Then the first real referendum is a runtime upgrade that removes Sudo. If it passes, it also proves that governance can upgrade the chain without developer access.
Questions for other parachain teams:
- Has anyone removed Sudo by referendum? Anything you wish you had kept as a recovery path?
- The old 4.x governance pallets (Democracy, Preimage, Scheduler) left storage behind under the same names. Did you clean it up with
killPrefixbefore reusing the names, or with a migration?
Full write-up: Robonomics 5.0: handing the keys to XRT holders
Code: Introduced governance pallets by akru · Pull Request #652 · airalab/robonomics · GitHub