Neutron is a decentralized network and public good; self-owned and governed by its stakeholder community of users, developers and tokenholders.
Neutron ships with a modular governance system designed to remain secure and integral to the platform’s economy as it evolves.
As a smart-contract platform, Neutron provides public infrastructure upon which the livelihoods of multiple applications, businesses and communities depend. Therefore, it requires governance mechanisms that recognize and reward diverse contributions to the network, permit consensus or compromise across an heterogenous set of participants and support efficiency and specialization while preserving accountability.
Neutron’s governance system was designed to meet this challenge. It leverages the foundational work by DAODAO and the modularity of smart-contracts to make governance more efficient and more accountable.
How is Neutron’s governance different for me as a user?
Because Neutron is secured by $ATOM and the Cosmos Hub, NTRN cannot be “staked” to generate staking rewards.
To obtain voting power in Neutron’s governance system, users must bond NTRN or DeFi tokens containing NTRN. This allows any account to participate in governance while potentially earning DeFi rewards, for example by providing NTRN liquidity on a DEX.
Overview
Neutron’s governance system is multi-layered and modular.
The most powerful layer is the Agora (Main DAO), which is controlled by the community through the votes of tokenholders. Below the Agora are the Committees (sub-DAOs), which are tasked with assisting the Agora with day-to-day operations. Committees are accountable to the Agora through a special type of proposal called Overrule proposals.
Agora (”Main DAO”)
The top layer, also known as the Agora or “main DAO”, is governed by Neutron’s stakeholders through the NTRN token. In the Agora, voting power (an account’s weight in the decision-making process) is calculated using dedicated smart-contracts called ‘Voting Vaults’. The Agora controls which Voting Vaults to add or remove through governance proposals.
Voting Vaults are tremendously flexible: they can be tailored to accept any tokenized position, whether fungible or not, as long as it contains or represents some amount of NTRN. At launch, we expect the following Voting Vaults to be available:
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NTRN Vault: accepts NTRN deposits and grants 1 point of voting power per token without lock-up.
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LP Token Vaults: Similar to Superfluid staking on Osmosis, these Vaults accepts LP token deposits and count the underlying NTRN tokens. Both NTRN-ATOM and NTRN-USDC pairs are expected to have Voting Vaults at launch. LP Token Vaults grant 1 point of voting power per NTRN token, without lock-up.
The Agora is the most powerful layer of Neutron’s governance system: its proposals are capable of triggering network upgrades and parameter changes. As a result, the Agora should be defensive: obtaining the DAO’s approval should be difficult, and only the most important decisions should be passed through the main DAO.
Committees (”sub-DAOs”)
To perform day-to-day operations (e.g. grants, incentives programs, etc.) efficiently, the Agora can create specialized Committees with dedicated powers and resources. These Committees (also known as sub-DAOs) are extremely flexible: who can participate, how votes are weighted and other parameters can be customized to meet specific objectives.
Committees are autonomous: they manage their operations and budgets independently from the Agora. They do so through specific proposals which do not require token holders to vote, only the Committees’ members. As a result, Committees are much faster to reach and execute decisions.
Overrule
Committees remain accountable to their admin, the Agora, which has the power to dissolve them or freeze their budgets. Any governance participants can transparently monitor a Committee’s activities on-chain, and a small minority of the voting power is sufficient to block a Committee’s proposal through the Overrule mechanism:
Proposals that passed a Committee vote are first queued in timelock, which delays their execution by three days. During this period, any Agora stakeholder can vote to veto the proposal. If 2% of the Agora’s voting power votes to overrule a timelocked proposal, it is automatically cancelled.
This mechanism forces Committees to act in accordance with the Agora’s interests. If they fail to do so, the Agora can block the contentious proposal and force the decisions to be settled by the entire tokenholder base through the Agora.