Lecture Recap: Cosmos Governance Overview

4 min readJul 10, 2023

July 6, invited by IBCL, CTO of SAO Network, Chase Wang, has delivered an elaborate lecture on Cosmos Governance at Cosmos SDK Developer Academy (Phase 2), held by Cosmos Hong Kong Accelerator, which is co-organized by IBCL, BianjieGlobal and Hashkey Capital etc.

As the CTO of SAO Network, a decentralized storage infrastructure based on Cosmos SDK, Chase Wang has gained a full understanding through rich experiences in Cosmos Governance. On that basis, Chase Wang has given a helpful lecture full of take-aways.

According to Chase Wang, everyone can participate in Cosmos governance by submitting or voting for proposals on condition that he/she has enough Cosmos native tokens, namely, ATOMs. In total, there are five types of proposals, i.e.

Text— Proposal to agree to a certain strategy, plan, commitment, future upgrade or other statement. Text proposals do not directly cause any changes, but they can be used to take a record of the community’s opinion or commitment to a future idea.
Community Pool Spend— Proposal to spend funds from the community pool on a certain project.
Parameter Change— Proposal to change a core on-chain parameter.
Software Upgrade — Proposal to upgrade the chain version.
IBC Client Update — Proposal to update an IBC client.

Then Chase Wang explained the full process of on-chain governance on Cosmos with the following graph.

“First, one should own a certain amount of ATOMs so as to pay the deposit for submitting a proposal.” Chase Wang said, “The minimum deposit is 250 ATOMs. Once a valid deposit has been paid, the proposal will enter the voting period.” There are four options for voting：

Abstain: The voter wishes to contribute to quorum without voting for or against a proposal.
Yes: Approval of the proposal in its current form.
No: Disapproval of the proposal in its current form.
NoWithVeto: A ‘NoWithVeto’ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance.

Furthermore, Chase Wang provided valuable insights on the basic governance parameters that determine whether a proposal is passed or vetoed, stressing the importance of meeting the required quorum and vote thresholds. As he put it, “At least 40% of Cosmos voting power should vote for the proposal, of which at least 50% should vote yes to get the proposal passed and at least 33.4% should veto to get the proposal vetoed.” “However, it’s worth noting that once a proposal is Vetoed, the deposit will be burnt immediately.” Chase Wang reminded.

Through his detailed explanations and examples, Chase Wang was able to break down the complex concepts of on-chain governance and make them more accessible to his audience. He also shared practical tips on how to submit a proposal on Cosmos with command lines, using SAO Network as an example. Since SAO Network is built on Cosmos SDK, one should follow the same steps of submitting a proposal on SAO Network as on Cosmos. Let’s take submitting a proposal on ParamChange as an example.

#Parameter Change

First, one should query staking params:

$saod query staking params 
 bond_denom: usct
 historical_entries: 10000 
 max_entries: 7
 max_validators: 5
 min_commission_rate: "0.000000000000000000" 
 unbonding_time: "300s"

Then, set proposal parameters like title, description, changesetc:

$cat change-staking.json
{
   "title": "Change Max Validators",
   "description": "Change Max Validators number to 10"，
   "changes":[
      {
       "subspace": "staking",
       "key":"MaxValidators",
       "value":10
      }
    ]，
    "deposit":"10000000usct"
}
$ saod tx govsubmit-legacy-proposal param-change change-staking.json--from alice --yes
$ saod query gov proposals 
 pagination:
   next_key: null 
   total:"@" 
   proposals:
   - deposit_end_time:"2023-07-05T07:37:56.856576Z"
   final_tally_result: 
   abstain_count:"0" 
   no_count: "@"
   no_with_veto_count:"0" 
   yes_count:"0" 
 id:"1" 
 messages:
 - '@type':/cosmos.gov.v1.MsgExecLegacyContent
 authority:sao10d07y265gmmuvt4z0w9aw880jnsr700j42cwgf 
 content:
   '@type': /cosmos.params.v1betalParameterChangeProposal 
   changes:
   - key: MaxValidators 
     subspace:staking 
     value:“10"
   description: Change Max Validators number to 10 
   title: Change Max Validators 
  metadata:""
  status: PROPOSAL_STATUS_VOTING_PERIOD
  submit_time: "2023-07-05T07:32:56.856576Z" 
  total_deposit:
  - amount:"10000000" 
  denom:usct
  voting_end_time:“2023-07-05T07:37:56.856576Z” 
  voting_start_time:"2023-07-05T07:32:56.856576Z" 
$ saod tx govvote 1yes--from alice--yes

Chase Wang emphasized, “One should set a suitable block height where the proposal will come into force or the proposal will fail.”

Overall, Chase Wang’s Q&A session was a highlight of the lecture, giving the audience a deeper appreciation of the workings of Cosmos governance and inspiring them to take an active role in shaping its future.

🎁 Request the lecture stuff in our Discord channel if you wanna get to know more.

About SAO Network

SAO Network is a decentralized storage infrastructure for Web3. It provides a dStorage protocol based on Cosmos SDK and IPFS to increase adoption of Web3 data storage and facilitate ecosystem applications.

Hedra Labs is the core developer team behind SAO Network and Storverse. It was established in Singapore in 2021 as a blockchain-focused R&D taskforce, composed of industry pioneers, senior architects, and developers from both fintech and blockchain fields. The team is dedicated to the development and evolution of Web3 and dStorage networks. Its ultimate goal is to provide a solid and comprehensive dStorage platform based on SAO Network for Web3 applications, making it secure, easy, and intuitive for users to own and manage their data.

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Lecture Recap: Cosmos Governance Overview

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