Polkadot Governance Mechanism V2

Polkadot employs a carefully designed governance mechanism aimed at allowing the network to evolve gracefully according to the will of its stakeholders. Its core objective is to ensure that the majority of staked assets can always control the network.

The first-generation decentralized governance system of Polkadot ( v1) consists of three main components:

• Technical Committee: Responsible for managing the upgrade schedule
• Council: An executive body elected through elections, responsible for managing parameters, administration, and expenditure proposals.
• Referendum: A universal voting system where long-term stakeholders have greater influence.

Governance v1 performed well in the early stages of operation, but as the system matures, further improvements are needed to overcome its limitations. For example, all referendums in v1 have the same weight, and only one referendum can be voted on at a time, which limits the system's flexibility.

To address these issues, Polkadot has launched governance v2(Gov2). Gov2 changes the way daily decisions are made, making referendums more flexible and agile, significantly increasing the number of collective decisions that the system can make.

The main changes of Gov2 include:

• Transfer the responsibilities of the council to token holders
• Dissolve the existing board of directors
• Allow users to delegate voting rights to community members in more ways.

In Gov2, anyone can initiate a referendum at any time, with no quantity restrictions. The new Origins and Tracks features have been added to optimize the referendum process:

• Origin is a descriptor of a specific privilege level.
• Each Origin corresponds to a referendum category, and each category is associated with a Track.
• Track defines the lifecycle of a proposal, and different Tracks are independent of each other.

This design allows the network to adjust the dynamics of voting based on the privilege level of the proposal. For example, Runtime upgrades and small treasury expenditures can adopt different Origins, thereby using different voting rates, approval rates, and other parameters.

In Gov2, voting can take place after the referendum is created, but certain conditions must be met to enter the "decided" state:

• After the "import period"
• The decision space has remaining.
• Payment determines the deposit

A referendum must meet both the approval rate and support rate requirements to be approved. Different Tracks have different confirmation periods and approval/support requirements.

Gov2 has also improved the voting delegation feature by introducing "multi-role delegation", allowing voters to designate different representatives for different categories of referendums.

To replace the technical committee, Gov2 introduced the "Polkadot Fellowship", which is a fundamentally autonomous expert body representing individuals with knowledge of the Polkadot network and protocol technology. The Fellowship adopts a hierarchical structure, where higher-level members have greater weight in overall opinions.

In general, Gov2 aims to further decentralize the governance of Polkadot, enhancing the system's flexibility and decision-making efficiency while maintaining the necessary security and stability.