Welcome to the Cosmos Hub Forum! Content here will guide you in being an active participant of the forum - recommended processes, formatting, moderation, etc.
Other helpful posts
Governance process overview
Cosmos Hub has an on-chain governance process that allows token holders to submit and vote on several kinds of proposals:
- Signalling Proposal: Signal an intent through text proposals. The only kind of proposal that does not directly cause any change.
- Community Spend Proposal: Spend tokens from the community pool.
- Parameter Change Proposal: Change on-chain parameters.
- Software Upgrade Proposal: Propose a software upgrade at a specified halt height.
- Client Update Proposal: Update an expired IBC client with a substitute client.
You can read more about the on-chain process in the Cosmos Hub documentation.
Voting FAQ
- Who can vote? Any ATOM holder who has staked their ATOMs with a validator. ATOM holders who have staked are also called delegators.
- How do I vote? You can cast your vote using the Keplr dashboard or the gaiad CLI.
- How much influence do I have? Your vote is proportional to your staked ATOMs.
- What happens if I don’t vote? If you have ATOMs staked with validators but choose not to vote on a proposal, you inherit the vote made by your validator. It’s like an opt-out if you want to vote differently from your validator – if you don’t take action you’ll automatically vote the way your validator does. But you can actively choose to vote differently or move to a different validator (re-delegating the first time happens instantaneously instead of the 14 days it takes to unbond completely).
General tips for governance participants:
- Vote in on-chain proposals! You can view current and past proposals using a block explorer such as Mintscan or Big Dipper.
- Ask questions and give feedback to proposal posts.
- Use your forum ‘likes’ to show support and boost visibility.
- Offer perspective and expertise where you can – the community benefits from participation and varied points of view!
Best practices for proposal makers:
Some collected wisdom on soft governance strategies for making and passing proposals. To make proposal-writing easier, topics in each Hub Proposal subcategory come with a template for formatting your content.
- Socialize the idea (e.g. On the Hub Discord, Twitter, arranging calls with stakeholders) before going on-chain. Because proposals can’t be changed once they move on-chain it’s important to solicit as much feedback and editorial comments from stakeholders as possible before setting it in stone.
- Include a link to the forum post (so that people can come read the discussion and contribute even once the proposal is on-chain)
- Take a pdf snapshot of the forum post and discussion just before going on-chain and pin it to IPFS so that the info is preserved. Include the IPFS link in your proposal text so that people viewing it on-chain can easily access historical content.
- Let your top-level post in the forum be exactly the text you expect to put on-chain (except for the changelog and IPFS link). This will help people know exactly what sort of edits and feedback might be needed to make the proposal text clear and palatable.
- Mind the character limit! The limit for proposals is 10000 characters and this includes markdown formatting and links.
How long should a proposal be on the forum before going on-chain?
We recommend keeping a proposal open for discussion for at least two weeks. In this time you may want to hold public conversations to answer more questions, such as using a Twitter Spaces call (you can tag @CosmosGov and we’ll RT to get you more visibility).
Before moving on-chain be sure to publicly announce a last call for feedback and state what day you’re planning to go on chain. People are more likely to provide feedback when they are given a deadline.
There is no hard rule that’s enforced, but use your judgement to ensure you’ve received adequate feedback before putting on chain.
