The Zeroth Proposal: Becoming

2024-07-21

On Saturday, July 20, 2024, by unanimous vote, validators and delegators on the Penumbra network approved its very first governance proposal, Proposal #0. The passing of this proposal means that Penumbra's mainnet has advanced to the next stage of becoming: Penumbra is now anchored to the firmament of the Interchain.

Proposal #0, now passed and in effect, enables IBC channels to other blockchains, ratifying Penumbra's mainnet by permitting it to be registered in the state of other chains – though a future governance proposal will be needed to actually open those channels, permitting tokens to be transferred in and out of the chain.

The full proposal reads:

Proposal #0: Mainnet ratification and establishment of IBC channels

This is the first governance proposal for the Penumbra network. It is a parameter-change proposal for Penumbra that will allow other IBC chains to recognize this chain as the Penumbra mainnet, thereby ratifying the network that was started two weeks ago as the canonical Penumbra network moving forward.

Crucially - This proposal does NOT enable transfers or trading - this will happen in a subsequent parameter change proposal. This proposal allows relayers to establish IBC connections and align on channel and token metadata in advance of a proposal to enable full functionality.

This governance proposal and the parameter changes associated with it will turn affect the following functions:

Allow for the establishment of IBC channels

Changes gas prices in order to reduce cost for relayers to establish channels

Voting YES for this proposal is a signaling vote to ratify mainnet and enable the preceding functions. This proposal requires a supermajority (2/3+1) in order to pass.

Attached to the proposal is a machine-readable payload which instructs the chain to:

enable IBC (but not token transfers yet),
lower gas prices to make IBC channels cheaper to establish, and
raise the validator downtime slashing penalty from zero to the minimum possible non-zero amount, a tiny nominal 1 basis point squared (1% of 1% of 1% of 1%).

As of this writing, the proposal's passing has already enabled this payload, setting these parameters in effect.

Unanimous Vote: YES

This governance proposal is notable in having passed totally unanimously: every single validator and every single delegator voted YES on the proposal to ratify the chain.

Turnout: 91.9%

The total voting power used in votes for Proposal #0 was 8,945,680.736 delegated UM, representing 91.9% of the delegated UM that exists as of this writing. Let's break that down:

Validator Participation

Overall, 40 validators voted in the proposal, of a total of 69 active validators as of this writing. Those validators who voted represented 91.8% of all voting power, a grand total of 8,934,414.311 delegated UM. This is a tremendously positive sign for the network, as this high rate of validator governance participation confirms what we at Starling Cybernetics already know: Penumbra's validators are highly engaged and active.

Delegator Participation

Despite the absence of an online governance frontend for delegators, some 0.1% of delegators by stake were committed enough to use the command line pcli wallet to cast a unanimous vote in favor of the proposal also, representing a total of 94,183.47125 delegated UM.

In order to usher the chain into greater democratic participation by delegators, Starling Cybernetics is building a governance frontend website so that delegators can cast votes using Prax Wallet on future proposals.

Expect more on this very soon!

Voting Receipt Tokens

A lesser-known feature of the Penumbra governance system is that every delegator who votes on a governance proposal is given commemorative voting receipt tokens proportionate to the stake with which they voted.

These receipt tokens only record that you voted, but do not record how you voted. Think of these tokens as the on-chain equivalent of those “I Voted!” stickers some off-chain elections hand out to voters:

In total, Proposal #0 minted 94,183,471,250 voted_on_0, at a rate of 1 UM of delegated stake to 1,000,000 voted_on_0. Because the proposal is now closed, this total minted amount is the total supply of this token that will ever exist, and only delegators who voted on this proposal received this token.

What delegators choose to do with this token and future voting receipt tokens for future governance proposals is up to the delegators who received them – we can imagine many possibilities.

Happy Monday to all!

—finch