Governance

🏛️ Governance

Decentralization is one of Serum’s founding tenants.

This principle is founded on the idea that the community knows best with regards to the direction of the Serum ecosystem. Serum’s responsiveness and flexibility are necessary traits for scaling up in this fast moving world. To prepare for the demands of a larger and more diverse group of users, it’s critical to have a framework for the community to have their say.

Voting and Serum’s Community Forum are some of the important governance constructs for empowering and leveraging the community’s thinking.

⚖️ Rules and Guidelines

You can also find the Governance Rules and Guidelines here.

The thoughts, perspectives, and ideas of Serum’s community are critical for the ecosystem’s development. We look forward to your contributions and constructive discussion.

How do ideas and discussions among the Serum community transform into Forum posts, and then into proposals on the DAO voting platform (https://dao.projectserum.com)?

The expectations and guidelines for this governance process are laid out below:

(1) Discussion

(A) “Informal” Discussion

Informal discussion will naturally emerge across various channels. We recommend channels such as Discord and even this Forum. The Serum LinkTree lists some popular channels: @projectserum | Linktree.

(B) “Formal” Discussion

You can bring informal discussion topics to the Serum Community Forum (https://forum.projectserum.com) once they are ready for more “formal” discussion in preparation for transformation into an actionable proposal.

The Forum is considered a more formal domain of discussion. As a Forum participant, you are expected to:

Articulate what you believe should happen or be deployed specifically; Open your post(s) to public, constructive analysis and criticism; Interact with comments to your post in a timely manner and demonstrate willingness to engage other participants in a constructive manner.

The community looks forward to a future where all topics and parameters (except sending funds to the treasury) will be up for voting.

It is expected that newly created forum topics are made open to discussion for at least 7 days before the relevant proposal on dao.projectserum.com is created for voting.

If you created a forum topic that has not yet been made into a proposal, and you wish to change the content that would go into that proposal, you are expected to: (1) create a new forum reply (post) in that thread specifying the changes, and (2) wait 72 hours before you can make a proposal about that topic accordingly on the DAO voting platform.

(2) Proposals (on the DAO Voting Platform)

There will naturally be some forum topics that evolve into new proposals on the DAO platform for voting (https://dao.projectserum.com).

We actively discourage editing of Forum topics which define potential proposals. You should make new posts instead. Editing other types of posts is generally accepted. You should emphasize what you changed in your post after editing.

Some discussions will result in longer threads and multiple conceptions of a potential proposal. Sometimes, a single post will receive enough positive affirmation.

(A) Creating a Proposal

We expect the forum topic to be created and open to discussion for at least 7 days before the relevant proposal (on the DAO voting platform) is created for voting.

All proposals submitted to the DAO voting platform must link back to a single Forum post (that summarizes all relevant information from that thread).

The content of the proposal must abide completely by that Forum post.

(B) Changing a Proposal

Sometimes, a proposer wants to make changes to a proposal after uploading it onto the DAO voting platform.

If you wish to make a change to a proposal (on the DAO voting platform), it is expected that you cancel that proposal and reply with the proposed changes to the Forum topic. There must be 72 hours between the upload of that new reply and the submission of the related proposal.

You can immediately make your new proposal after submitting the new Forum reply. The new proposal should link back to the same thread.

The reply (post) to Forum topic should specify there will be a change to the proposal. You should copy-paste the Forum topic’s Title, plus an amendment that appends “V2, V3, etc", at the top of the post.

(3) Voting

The voting structure is currently: 1 SRM is 1 vote. The DAO Voting Platform UI may be familiar to many, but here is a quick guide to the object level jargon:

realm — an instance of the DAO

governance — an address governed by the DAO (e.g. a token account or program upgrade authority)

proposal — an action to vote on, e.g., transferring tokens or upgrading a program

Governance parameters are as follows:

100,000 SRM to create a “governance”

25,000 SRM to create a proposal for the treasury

Maximum of 3 days for voting, once a proposal is uploaded.

Yes-Vote Threshold: 1.3% (1.3% of 1% of the total supply, or around 1.5 million) Instruction timelock after vote: 0 days

These parameters, such as the current duration of the voting period, may be subject to change via governance.

(4) Enforcement

We expect that the community will veto proposals that do not meet the Serum Governance Guidelines.

If any parameters listed in this post change through the governance process, the contents of this post will be edited to reflect these changes.