Governance

Polkadot uses a sophisticated governance mechanism that allows it to evolve gracefully over time at the ultimate behest of its stakeholders.

In order to do this, we bring together various novel mechanisms, including an amorphous state-transition function stored on-chain and defined in a platform-neutral intermediate language (i.e. WebAssembly) and several on-chain voting mechanisms such as referenda with adaptive super-majority thresholds and batch approval voting.

Overview

The governance system of Polkadot is founded wholly around the idea of stakeholder voting. A key and unfailing rule is:

All changes to the protocol must be agreed upon by referendum