ATOM holders have the responsibility of defining and updating the Cosmos
Hub Charter, which includes directives at the highest level: the purpose of the
Cosmos Hub, its essential governance architecture, as well as which entities are
admitted Councils. Furthermore, ATOM holders have ultimate discretion over
the passage of policies, priorities, and budgets with veto power on all proposals
put forward by the Cosmos Assembly.
This discussion thread is a place to collect the community’s thoughts and ideas around the contents of the charter.
One thing that we should definitely do is work out the issue of hub competing with existing cosmos l1’s
additionally, I think that like Juno, hub should be open to funding new l1’s beyond ics, because this enhances the utility of the treasury to the rest of the ecosystem.
“One thing that we should definitely do is work out the issue of hub competing with existing cosmos l1’s”
Can you expand on this? I’m not getting the sense that the hub is really going to be competing with other zones directly. ICS consumer zones aligned with the hub who wish to be in the “Atom economic zone” may try to compete with other zones. The hub itself, though, with these new proposed mechanics, seems to be carving out it’s own niche.
Maybe not. I don’t think a hub charter should be gatekeeping the use cases of a consumer chain just because it may be similar to another zone.
Neutron has permissionless smart contract capabilities (Juno) and will have liquid staking (QS, Stride, etc.) and whatever else someone wants to build on it. Should the hub be like “Nope, sorry, that undermines several other projects, get your own validators”?
I guess my point is how do you put this within a charter? If you gatekeep all of the features of consumer chains, it would just be hamstringing itself and provide security to useless chains.
We should give clarity. Maybe we give clarity that consumer chains aren’t gatekept (I’d recommend some kind of gatekeeping but your neutron example is a good one) or maybe we give clarity that there’s gatekeeping or maybe we factor alignment into decisions.
But some of the charter we can actually give clarity on this and clarity is really important, clarity is where the 2.0 paper failed to deliver wrt the funding of the treasury-- that was about as clear as mud.
I’m going to work on improving that at a medium pace… as currently got the 'vid…
I hope you’re not of the opinion that I am suggesting that we do that – I think that there are many, many, many concepts that haven’t been explored. I just don’t want to see borg-gaia. Vibe like borg-gaia promotion is for sure the kinda thing that can make me lean, ah, well 69,420,808 atoms should go into nonborg Gaia but Borg Gaia should get zero.
I love atom , I want atom to flower more than any other on cosmos ( call me greedy or shortsighted )
But the cosmos design allows me to like one chain more than other, still not reducing my overall positiveness around Cosmos.
After prop 69 , and while seeing other project teams undermining the Hub or to say the least against its success ( maybe they see it as a threat? ) , the Hub was in dare need of something like Neutron… If it succeeds, or not, time will tell !
Maybe the biggest flaw on a system composed of sovereign chains is a never-ending dispute between them ? Could also turn out to be it’s biggest strength if an harmonic string is found !!
( Sorry for the off topic )
As for councils , senates and assemblies, I think the voting right and duty of the Atom staker must always have the power and responsibility of veto!
If you want to democratize further to a more practical governance , responsibility and judgment power must never leave the stakers hand ! Transparency is fundamental, Blockchains do not lie, people do .
I didn’t see 69 as undermining the hub and Hi I’m Jacob one of the vetoers of 69 and I would like to tell you why I vetoed, so I voted no because I didn’t feel that Gaia was really ready or maybe that CW was not ready for Gaia, I also felt that the people promoting 69 were not well informed about some of the system resource usage downsides of CW (Osmosis memory usage doubled even without any contracts deployed) and also did not accurately discuss the risks.
Anyway that was the reason for my no vote.
I vetoed 69 because of the no with veto text on 69.
Also I sort of think that this is on topic.
It’s a reasonable concern to raise at this juncture.
I’m sorry I didn’t meant 69 undermined the Hub , passed on, we as a majority agreed on a minimal Hub, neutral and sterile of smart contract capability.
But through ics, the hub can now sort of delegate that task to other chain(s) under security of the hub validator set. And while it is indeed great to see other chains with the possibility of offering ICS or liquid staking modules, truth is it kinda undermines Hub’s role.
It certainly looks like that some chains financially benefit from a weaker Hub, and must understand that core development of such chains, in general, have a strong wording on Hub’s voting power.
I’m not pointing fingers here , just what it looks and a humble opinion from someone more interested on the hub’s success than any other cosmos chain
I think we can have minimalism and ICS but I’m not really sure that we can have minimalism and atom 2.0 if that makes sense?
2.0 adds a great deal of feature scope to the hub, then again, it seems really good to me I have decided to try to make any modifications necessary to the 2.0 plan to help it to pass and maybe even to actually kick off a minimal hub or more minimal hub that is chartered to be a minimal hub see the hub didn’t really have a constitution at launch and during some of the discussions on 69, remember somebody saying well we don’t have a constitution because we don’t want to have binding scope restrictions.
Love this. I think that one way to diffuse objections to the allocator might actually be to explicitly state that the allocator can be used to fund independent layer ones.
The WP set a long term roadmap for the development of the Hub while the Charter role is to make sure the implementation is done with a certain standard of decentralization, ethics and accountability that protects $ATOM holders.
This is why it is crucial for the ATOM community to put sufficient mindshare and thinking into the charter.
I’ve taken some time to review work from one of the most brilliant minds in the Cosmos for governance related matters: @sacha. There are some nuggets out there that I can’t recommend enough. Before interacting with this topic, I invite everyone to get familiar with his thinking so here are a few resources to consider:
There is a lot to cover so I’ll only discuss in this post the soon to be established Community Council, which should be the backbone for governance on the Cosmos Hub for the time being and until a full Cosmos Assembly is formed.
The ATOM 2.0 paper requires us to develop new mental models for governance. The WP is ambitious and its implementation will be challenging, requiring novel governance foundations.
The WP suggests the creation of multiple Councils. The sum of those Councils will form the future Cosmos Assembly.
My suggestion is to adopt a progressive, measured approach when forming those Councils. To initiate this work, I believe the first governance piece we need to establish is the Community Council.
This Council will represent the interests of the ATOM community at large. The Community Council can be used as a platform and launchpad to form the other Cosmos Councils until there are enough Councils to justify the creation of the higher order Cosmos Assembly. Less is more. As such, the Cosmos Council should be representative enough of the ATOM holders.
Regarding the responsibilities of the Community Council, I thought of the following aspects (non exhaustive list):
Lead to completion the governance aspect of the ATOM 2.0 vision that ends with the launch of critical Cosmos Councils & the Cosmos Assembly (final step)
Enforce public accountability, notably with other Cosmos Councils that will be created further down the road
Create a framework for managing the Treasury Pool
Act as a bridge to the broader ATOM community.
Reduce the information gap and facilitate access to information by making it digestible.
Create and maintain reporting on the Hub and its various entities: state of decentralization, work being done in other Cosmos Hub Councils, product feedback.
The composition & funding of the Community Council is as important as its mandate. A few suggestions:
It should be representative enough of the entire ATOM community. As such, it should include a basket of: core developers and contributors + validators + regular ATOM holders + OGs from other Hub aligned Cosmos chains
It should be large enough to avoid excessive centralization and cartelization. I don’t have an exact idea about the number of members, maybe somewhere between 7 and 11 members. Less than 7 encourages centralization while more than 11 makes effective governance challenging
It should NOT be pro bono. Working for free encourages dubious behavior and conflicts of interest.
It should be funded separately from the other Cosmos Councils to avoid competing for the same resources, which again favors dubious behaviors
Members should NOT figure on other Cosmos Hub Councils
Thank you for reading. Looking forward to engaging with other members of the community.