Solana has reached a certain level of maturity, with almost 3.5yrs of Mainnet-Beta, the development of an independent validator client (Firedancer), alternative releases of the default client (Jito), a growing distribution of stake (NC of 30) and a vibrant community of validators, developers, NFT communities and more.
With this in mind, it is proposed to develop a formalized framework and implementation for governance on Solana.
This is necessary to foster continued decentralization of power in the network, moving away from single decision-making authorities and enabling sustainable collaboration between client teams.
Governance on Solana currently exists minimally and is used only rarely. Primarily protocol-altering changes go through levels of social consensus with ultimate authority resting with the core engineers at Solana Labs.
On-chain voting is possible through the feature program, however lacks functionality and visibility and has barely been used in practice.
A group of interested community members is developing ideas around governance to identify the most suitable path forward.
Ad-hoc discussion takes place in the Staking Alliance Discord and ideas are being captures on this Gitbook
This forum will be used for more specific and formulated proposals to be discussed and finalized, with the intention of then putting these to a vote.
The goal is to develop a framework for governance, with further discussion taking place at Breakpoint 2023 in Amsterdam, and beginning an implementation in Q1 2024.
To ensure low friction and a smooth transition to an active governance ecosystem the initial scope should be limited in scope to the most critical aspects to maintain focus and avoid governance fatigue amongst participants.