NOTE: THIS IS A DRAFT; MAKE A PR BEFORE IT BECOMES FINAL!
We the people of the Cosmos, in order to create a free world, enable voluntary transactions, facilitate permissionless innovation, ensure economic security, and maintain order among sovereign zones, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Cosmos Hub.
This document is a work in progress. This document assumes familiarity with the current workings of cosmoshub4 as of Oct 11th 2022. What is described here are modifications to what already is. This clause will be removed with future revisions, and the corresponding parts of the document updated with a full description of the constitution of the hub.
The mission of the Cosmos Hub is to provide a classical BFT proof-of-stake multi-token payment and transfer system; and to provide the security of the platform to applications hosted in other chains (zones); for as many people as possible in the Sol system.
The one and only economic incentive model is the collection of market-based transaction fees from a large number of transactions across all the blockchains secured by the bonding of ATOM tokens, first and foremost from simple intra and inter-zone token transfers.
The main hub is uniquely identified by chainid "cosmoshub". This chain will serve the following functions:
- ATOM staking
- flat PHOTON inflation
- intra-hub token transfers
- IBC token transfers
- ICS service
- governance proposals
The ATOM token functions as voting shares, economic incentive shares, and security bond for the Cosmos Hub.
To preserve the security and identity of the acting governance and validator set, the inflation rate of the ATOM token is made to vary to target 2/3 of all ATOMs. The maximum inflation rate is 20% non-compounded per year. There is no minimum inflation rate, and it can even be negative.
Inflated ATOM tokens are paid to bonded ATOM holders in proportion to each delegator's staking amount.
Staked ATOMs are converted to bonded share units.
The unbonding period is 3 weeks.
Redelegation is allowed once per unbonding period for any delegation.
Double signing at any height/round/step results in slashing penalty that is proportional to the total amount of double signing by all validators for that height/round/step, with evidence collected during the unbonding period; the penalty will range from +0% to 100%, the latter when 2/3 of voting power double-signs.
Complex signing failures (those that require +1/3 to coordinate) will result in complete slashing.
Any inflation of ATOM tokens to the Community Pool or designated Treasury DAO beyond the default inflation rate described here requires a supermajority vote of a special inflation governance proposal type.
Liquid staking may only be supported through interchain accounts.
The ATOM distribution will be 1:1 airdropped into the PHOTON distribution. The PHOTON distribution will also be airdropped to IBC chains with no need to transfer any ATOMs back to the hub.
Thereafter the PHOTON token will be inflated at a constant fixed rate equal to 5% of the initial distribution, forever, and paid to the bonded ATOM holders. This inflation rate may be decreased but never increased, except for any issuance approved by the special governance procedure.
The PHOTON and ATOM tokens will be whitelisted as transaction fee payments for the hub and all simple-transfer zones.
Any inflation of PHOTON tokens to the Community Pool or designated Treasury DAO beyond the default inflation rate described here requires a supermajority vote of a special inflation governance proposal type.
The first zones secured by ICS will be simple-transfer zones. These are blockchain applications that provide the following functions:
- intra-zone token transfers
- IBC token transfers back to the hub
- atomic cross-chain transactions across other simple-transfer zones
The ICS system must ensure a reasonable Nakamoto coefficient for each zone.
The ICS system must enable geographically regional validator sets, at least in the following regions;
- Western US
- Eastern US
- Central America
- South America
- Europe
- Asia
- Africa
Tax proceeds are sent to the Community Pool.
The tax rate is initially 2%, but can be increased up to 50% by governance vote.
Treasury DAOs should be judged based on how accountable and functional they are; “real” people should hold roles (1 person max 1 role) including possibly 1,2,3 executive roles, and be fired by the DAO’s oversight committee (or hub gov) for failing their job description.
Air-drops or forks of the ATOM token to new chains is freely allowed. The air-drop may be modified based on consensus voting and governance voting activity according to the philosophy of the new chain.
The governance process will extend the voting deadline to ensure at least 2 weeks of voting after the quorum has been met.
The inflation of additional ATOMs or PHOTONs to the Community Pool or designated Treasury DAO require a special inflation propoal type, and the threshold shall be 67% instead of the default 50%. The special inflation proposal can include a description of the purpose of the inflation, but cannot include any other modifications to the hub or constitution.
New updates to the hub should be broken down into independent components and discussed/proposed separately with adequate time between, regardless of any omnibus whitepaper. There must be a competing set of DAO systems to ensure that proposals are well factored.
The only cryptographic assumptions used by the Cosmos Hub including its consensus shall be Ed25519 and Secp256k1 elliptic curves, and RIPEMD160 and SHA256 hash functions.
The hub should not have any VM functionality, but be plainly implemented in a single garbage collected language as reference (namely Go; and other clients can implement it all in another language like Rust).
For discussion, see https://forum.cosmos.network/t/atom-one-constitution-proposal/7514 and cosmoshub@googlegroups.com