Governance storage

Just like PoS, governance also has its own storage space.

Proposals

Each proposal is stored in a sub-key under the internal proposal address. The storage keys involved are:

/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/content: Vec<u8>
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/author: Address
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/type: ProposalType
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/start_epoch: Epoch
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/end_epoch: Epoch
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/grace_epoch: Epoch
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/proposal_code: Option<Vec<u8>>
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/funds: u64
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/result: ProposalResult
/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/epoch/$id: u64
⏱️

Definition of "Epoch":

An epoch is a range of blocks or time that is defined by the base ledger and made available to the PoS system. This document assumes that epochs are identified by consecutive natural numbers. All the data relevant to PoS are associated with epochs.

/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$epoch/$id is used for efficient iteration over proposals by epoch.

$epoch refers to the same value as the one specified in the grace_epoch field.

/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/result is used to store the result of the proposal after the tally has been performed: this allows the recover of a past result even after the validator set (and the corresponding voting powers) has changed.

GovernanceAddress

GovernanceAddress parameters and global storage keys are:

/$GovernanceAddress/counter: u64
/$GovernanceAddress/min_proposal_fund: u64
/$GovernanceAddress/max_proposal_code_size: u64
/$GovernanceAddress/min_proposal_period: u64
/$GovernanceAddress/max_proposal_content_size: u64
/$GovernanceAddress/min_proposal_grace_epochs: u64
/$GovernanceAddress/pending/$proposal_id: u64
  • counter is used to assign a unique, incremental ID to each proposal.
  • min_proposal_fund represents the minimum amount of locked tokens to submit a proposal.
  • max_proposal_code_size is the maximum allowed size (in bytes) of the proposal WASM code.
  • min_proposal_period sets the minimum voting time window (in Epoch).
  • max_proposal_content_size tells the maximum number of characters allowed in the proposal content.
  • min_proposal_grace_epochs is the minimum required time window (in Epoch) between end_epoch and the epoch in which the proposal has to be executed.
  • /$GovernanceAddress/pending/$proposal_id - this storage key is written only before the execution of the code defined in /$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/proposal_code and deleted afterwards. Since this storage key can be written only by the protocol itself (and by no other means), VPs can check for the presence of this storage key to be sure that a proposal_code has been executed by the protocol and not by a transaction.

Votes

Vote transaction creates or modifies the following storage key:

/$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/vote/$delegation_address/$voter_address: ProposalVote

The storage key will only be created if the transaction is signed either by a validator or a delegator. In case a vote misses a required memo or carries a memo with an invalid format, the vote will be discarded at validation time (by the VP) and it won't be written to storage.

External storage

The governance machinery also relies on a subkey stored under the NAM token address:

/$NAMAddress/balance/$GovernanceAddress: u64

This is to leverage the NAM VP to check that the funds were correctly locked. The governance subkey, /$GovernanceAddress/proposal/$id/funds will be used after the tally step to know the exact amount of tokens to refund or move to Treasury.