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Governance Process

🚧 DRAFT — not yet ratified. This page proposes the off-chain process that precedes a binding on-chain vote. The phases below reflect how Unibase governance is intended to work; every value marked TBD still needs to be set and ratified by the community before this page becomes normative.

Until then, only the on-chain rules in Proposals & Execution are enforced — those are in the contracts and cannot be bypassed. Everything here is social process: it has no on-chain enforcement, and its whole value is that participants follow it voluntarily.

A proposal that goes straight to an on-chain vote usually fails — not because it’s a bad idea, but because nobody has seen it. The phases below exist to surface objections while changing the proposal is still cheap.

The three phases

Section titled “The three phases”
Phase Where Duration To advance
1. Request for Comment Governance forum ≥ TBD days Rough consensus in the thread. No formal vote
2. Temperature Check Snapshot TBD days ≥ TBD vUB voting For, and For > Against
3. On-chain Vote Governor (via Tally, or cast) 1-day delay + 7-day vote + 2-day timelock Quorum (4%) + simple majority — enforced on-chain

Only Phase 3 is binding. Phases 1 and 2 are gates that a proposal should pass through, not gates that the contracts check.

Phase 1 — Request for Comment

Section titled “Phase 1 — Request for Comment”

Goal: find out what’s wrong with your idea while it’s still free to change it.

  • Post to the governance forum with a title of the form RFC — <your title>.
  • State what you are proposing, what problem it solves, and who it affects. For parameter changes, state the current value, the proposed value, and what you expect to happen.
  • Respond to questions. Revise the proposal in the thread.

Leave at least TBD days for discussion. If consensus is clearly absent when that window closes, the proposal should not advance — reopen the RFC instead of escalating to a vote you will lose.

Phase 2 — Temperature Check

Section titled “Phase 2 — Temperature Check”

Goal: measure sentiment without spending gas.

  • Create a Snapshot poll under s:unibase.eth summarizing the RFC, and calling out anything that changed between the RFC and the poll.
  • Options are For / Against / Abstain, weighted by vUB.
  • Link the poll back into the forum thread.

Snapshot votes are gasless — off-chain signatures, weighted by the same vUB balance the Governor reads. They cost a signature, not a transaction, which is why sentiment is measured here and not on-chain.

Advancement: at least TBD vUB voting For, with For > Against. If Against wins, the proposal does not advance.

Phase 3 — On-chain Vote

Section titled “Phase 3 — On-chain Vote”

Goal: execute.

At this point the process becomes contract-enforced, and the rules stop being negotiable:

Requirement Value
To submit a proposal 2,500,000 vUB
Voting delay 1 day (7,200 blocks)
Voting period 7 days (50,400 blocks)
To pass 4% quorum + For > Against
Before execution 2-day Timelock

Below the proposal threshold, partner with a delegate who holds enough vUB to submit on your behalf — the proposal is yours, the submission is theirs.

Simulate your calldata before submitting. See Proposals & Execution — a proposal that reverts on execution still consumes the full ~10-day cycle before anyone finds out.

Changing this process

Section titled “Changing this process”

Because these phases are social rather than on-chain, changing them does not require an on-chain vote — but it does require legitimacy. Process changes should themselves go through a Snapshot vote with a TBD-day period and TBD quorum.

Open questions for ratification

Section titled “Open questions for ratification”

The values left as TBD above are genuine decisions, not placeholders awaiting a default:

Question Consideration
RFC minimum duration Long enough for people in every timezone to see it; Uniswap uses 7 days
Temperature Check duration Shorter than the RFC — it measures, it doesn’t deliberate
Temperature Check threshold Absolute vUB, not a percentage, so a quiet week can’t lower the bar. Must be reachable at current staked supply, which is small
Process-change quorum Should be higher than a normal proposal — changing the rules deserves more consensus than using them

The Temperature Check threshold is the one to get right. Set it too high against today’s staked vUB and nothing ever advances; set it too low and Phase 2 stops filtering anything.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”