DAO | Khala Governance Guidance Overview

Phala Network
Phala Network
4 min readAug 30, 2021

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Dear Phamily,

The Khala democratic governance mechanism has been published (and will become a template for the Phala in the future).

https://wiki.phala.network/en-us/docs/governance/

Khala Governance wiki:https://wiki.phala.network/en-us/docs/governance/

As early as April this year, the Phala team announced that Phala/Khala would manage the community and network by adopting a DAO. The early Khala network will use the same governance mechanism as Polkadot and Kusama. This is a relatively mature mechanism consisting of three parties: the public, the council, and the technical committee. These jointly govern with the stated goal of ensuring that the majority of the stake can always command the network. No matter whether the proposal is submitted by the public (PHA token holders) or the council, it will eventually have to go through a referendum where all holders, weighted by stake, make decisions.

  • Public: PHA token holders.
  • Council: Created to represent passive stakeholders, Phala will implement a “council”. The council is an on-chain entity comprised of several actors, each represented as an on-chain account. On Phala, the initial council consists of 5 members. This is expected to increase over the next few months to 11 seats. Along with controlling the treasury, the council is called upon primarily for three tasks of governance: proposing sensible referenda, canceling undisputedly dangerous or malicious referenda as well as filtering out disingenuous, malicious, or hollow proposals, and electing the technical committee. We will announce the first batch of members of the Phala Council soon, so stay tuned.
  • Technical Committee: The Technical Committee was introduced in the Phala rollout and governance post as one of the three chambers of Phala governance (alongside the Council and the Referendum chamber). The Technical Committee is composed of the teams that have successfully implemented or specified either a Phala parachain or Phala Host. The Technical Committee can, along with the Council, produce emergency referenda, which are fast-tracked for voting and implementation.

Key Parameters

  • Launch Period7 days. How often new public referenda are launched.
  • Voting Period7 days. How long votes for referenda are collected.
  • Emergency Voting Period3 hours. The minimum voting period for a fast-tracked emergency referendum.
  • Minimum Deposit10 PHA. The minimum amount to be used as a deposit for a public referendum proposal.
  • Enactment Period8 days. The minimum period for locking funds and the period between a proposal being approved and enacted.
  • Cooloff Period: 7 days. The period in blocks(approx. 7 days)where a proposal may not be re-submitted after failing a vote.

About the Referenda

Referenda are simple, inclusive, stake-based voting schemes. Referenda can be started in one of several ways:

  • Publicly submitted proposals;
  • Proposals submitted by the council by majority;
  • Proposals submitted as part of the enactment of a prior referendum;
  • Emergency proposals submitted by the Technical Committee and approved by the Council.

Public Referenda

Anyone can propose a referendum by depositing the minimum amount of PHA for a certain period (number of blocks). If someone agrees with the proposal, they may deposit the same amount of tokens to support it — this action is called seconding. The proposal with the highest amount of bonded support will be selected to be a referendum in the next voting cycle. There can be a maximum of 100 public proposals in the proposal queue.

Council Referenda

A referendum needs to be voted forward by the council, either as:

  • Unanimous Council — When all members of the council agree on a proposal, it can be moved to a referendum. This referendum will have a negative turnout bias (that is, a smaller amount of staked voting is necessary for it to pass — see “Adaptive Quorum Biasing”, below).
  • Majority Council — When agreement from only a simple majority of council members occurs, the referendum can still be voted upon, but it will require majority vote to pass (51%).

There can only be one active referendum at any given time, except when there is also an emergency referendum in progress.

To know more details about the Khala democracy governance mechanism, please click here.

About Phala

Phala Network tackles the issue of trust in the computation cloud.

This blockchain is a trustless computation platform that enables massive cloud processing without sacrificing data confidentiality. Built around TEE-based privacy technology already embedded into modern processors, Phala Network’s distributed computing cloud is versatile and confidential. By separating the consensus mechanism from computation, Phala ensures processing power is highly scalable but not wasteful. Together, this creates the infrastructure for a powerful, secure, and scalable trustless computing cloud.

As a member parachain of the Polkadot cross-chain ecosystem, Phala will be able to provide computing power to other blockchain applications while protecting the data layer, enabling possibilities like privacy-protected DeFi trading positions and transaction history, co-computing DID confidential data, developing light-node cross-chain bridges, and more.

On-chain services currently being developed on Phala Network include Web3 Analytics: high-performance smart contracts from Phala to enable highly concurrent mass data analytics with privacy, paving the way for an alternative to Google Analytics that inherently respects individual confidentiality.

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