Comparing Gov1 and OpenGov Referendums

To read about how referenda worked in case of Gov1, please read this - Referendum

DifferencesOpenGovGovernance V1

How can you start a referendum?

Anyone is able to start a referendum at any time and they can do so as many times as they wish. Several new features, known as Origins and Tracks, are introduced to help aid in the flow and processing of the referenda protocol.

Referenda can be started in one of several ways:

  1. Publicly submitted proposals; Democracy Proposals

  2. Proposals submitted by the council, either through a majority or unanimously; Council Motions

  3. Proposals submitted as part of the enactment of a prior referendum;

  4. Emergency proposals submitted by the Technical Committee and approved by the Council. Technical Committee​

How does approval mechanism for referenda work?

Referenda must fulfil a number of criteria before they are moved into a state known as Deciding. Until they are in this state, they remain undecided.

The criteria for entering the Decided state is a follows:

  1. A lead-in period that outlines the amount of time that must elapse before deciding can begin.

  2. There must be room for the decision. All Tracks specify their own limit on the number of referenda which can be decided simultaneously.

  3. A Decision Deposit must be paid. Creating a referendum is cheap as the deposit value consists of only the value required for the on-chain storage needed to track it. But, having a referendum reviewed and decided upon carries the risk of using up the limited spots available in the referenda queue. It makes sense to have a larger, but refundable deposit requirement to help mitigate spam.

Anyone can propose a referendum by depositing the minimum amount of tokens for a certain period (number of blocks).

  • If someone agrees with the proposal, they may deposit the same amount of tokens to show support. This action is called endorsing.

  • The proposal with the highest amount of bonded support will be selected to be a referendum in the next voting cycle.

The bonded tokens will be released once the proposal is tabled (that is, brought to a vote).

For Governance v1, there can be a maximum of 100 public proposals in the proposal queue.

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