Cosmos Hub 3 Upgrade & Stake Capital’s Support of Proposal D
Following ongoing work by the Tendermint team on Cosmos SDK improvements, the Cosmos Hub 3 Proposal A upgrade was submitted on July 26, 2019. The standard upgrade process for goes such that Proposal A gauges the community’s desire to pursue the specifically detailed upgrade, if this proposal is approved, a second proposal, called Proposal B, is put forth containing the exact software release that will contain the changes to be included in the upgrade. Only if this second proposal is also approved does the new release go live on the network.
Among many other alterations and bug fixes (see the full list here), this upgrade includes the work of the following proposals:
- “Activate the Community Pool” — enabling governance to spend funds from the community pool.
- “Don’t Burn Deposits for Rejected Governance Proposals Unless Vetoed” — if a proposal gets rejected without being vetoed, the deposits will be returned to the depositors (and if a proposal fails to meet quorum, its deposit will still be burned).
- “Notification for Security Critical Hard Fork at Block 482100”, critical security vulnerability in the codebase for the Cosmos Hub.
- “Increase Max Validator Set Size to 125”.
The two most significant changes included in this new version of the Cosmos SDK enable future governance proposals relating to on-chain parameters to no longer require halts or forks of the network and community funds to be spent via governance proposals. This version of the upgraded Cosmos SDK (Gaia v2.0.0-rc1) was deployed on the Gaia-13006 testnet, with genesis on Aug 20 2019.
Proposal A passed overwhelmingly, with 86.95% voting YES and 78% of ATOMs participating. Following the acceptance of the Cosmos Hub 3 Upgrade Proposal A, Proposal B was submitted on August 23, 2019, intended to signal acceptance/rejection of the precise software release for Cosmos Hub 3.
However within a couple days of the submission of Proposal B, a number of timing issues surfaced. Brought forward by Christopher Goes, the specification of an exact restart time in the Proposal B genesis file could potentially result in a high degree of deviation from the targeted Hub restart time, due to block time variability over the roughly one month time period between submission of the proposal and enactment.
Secondary debates also ensued around the amount of downtime that should be provided to validators to upgrade their infrastructure — ultimately 1 hour was selected—and the selection of a restart time for Cosmos Hub 3 that is fair for all validators, throughout timezones worldwide.
Proposal B was superseded by Proposal C, meaning that the voting result of Proposal B had no consequence on Proposal C (Proposal B had low participation due to this restart time flaw, with only 26% of ATOMs participating).
However, it quickly became apparent that Proposal C was also flawed. The vote period on Proposal C was set to end on September 16th, after the proposed block upgrade time. Of course, unless a majority vote was accepted as sufficient to trigger the upgrade, Proposal C would have to be replaced. The community quickly agreed that a majority vote did not make sense in this case due to the lack of time pressure with the upgrade.
Proposal D was created with corrected timing values: a proposed state export at Block Height 1,933,000 on September 24, 2019 at or around 1:53 pm UTC, and a subsequent Cosmos Hub 3 launch, 60 minutes later, at Block Height 1,933,000.
Although at the time of posting Proposal D hasn’t yet reached quorum, 100% of cast votes have been for YES. Stake Capital has joined in by casting a YES vote in support of the corrected Cosmos Hub 3 Proposal D.
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