On the relevance of the Clarity Act to this proposal, we must respectfully disagree with your statement. Here is a direct excerpt from the Clarity Act:
“No person or group of persons under common control—
(i) has the unilateral authority, directly or indirectly, through any contract, arrangement, understanding, relationship, or otherwise, to control or materially alter the functionality, operation, or rules of consensus or agreement of the blockchain system or its related digital commodity; or
(ii) has the unilateral authority to direct the voting, in the aggregate, of 20 percent or more of the outstanding voting power of such blockchain system by means of a related digital commodity, nodes or validators, a decentralized governance system, or otherwise, in a blockchain system which can be altered by a voting system.”
This section clearly refers to outstanding voting power, not to asset ownership. Many in the ecosystem have mistakenly interpreted this as a 20% ownership threshold, whereas the law explicitly concerns the aggregate votepower—regardless of how it is acquired.
In practice, this means that any validator controlling or inheriting 20% of the total voting power—even through delegated stake and irrespective of self-bond—would represent a breach of this rule.
For this reason, we maintain that the proposal is directly relevant to ensuring the Hub’s compliance with the Clarity Act, by introducing an on-chain mechanism that prevents the accumulation of outsized voting power through delegations. This is precisely the safeguard that the Act implies, and one that the Cosmos Hub—as well as every other Cosmos based chain using delegated Proof of Stake—currently lacks.
On the impact of this proposal
Contrary to your assertion, this change does have an immediate and positive effect. It establishes a hard, enforceable limit on delegated voting influence, ensuring no entity can unilaterally exceed a safe threshold. This is not a symbolic gesture — it is a functional protection applied directly at the governance module level. And we believe this function could have meaningful impact outside of the Cosmos Hub but through any chain using the SDK and seeking compliance to these rules.
On the technical implications
We also wish to clarify that the proposed update is surgically minimal. It does not interfere with other chain modules or introduce new dependencies. The only modification occurs within thex/gov/keeper/tally.gofile, where the vote count summation now includes a check against theVotePowerCapparameter.
If there are any identified dependencies beyond this scope, we welcome a concrete technical review to address them. Otherwise, based on our analysis, no cross-module impact exists.
In summary, we intend to proceed toward an on-chain vote for this proposal unless compelling technical or legal counterarguments are presented.