Governance
How the network is governed
Network upgrades follow an open improvement-proposal process. Substantive governance — the Council, the treasury, the Mandate — lives with the Foundation.
Lifecycle
The improvement-proposal lifecycle.
A network change is not a decree. It moves through a fixed, open process — proposal, review, vote, upgrade — so every change to the network is reviewable before it ships.
01
Proposal.
Anyone can draft an improvement proposal — a precise, reviewable specification of a network change, with its rationale and its risks stated plainly.
02
Review.
The proposal is discussed in the open. Operators, researchers, and the Council scrutinise the design, the security implications, and the upgrade path.
03
Vote.
A reviewed proposal goes to a vote. The outcome is recorded openly, so the decision and its mandate are both verifiable.
04
Upgrade.
An approved change is scheduled and shipped to validators as a coordinated upgrade — never silently, never as a kill-switch.
Rollout
How a change reaches validators.
An approved proposal still has to ship safely. Upgrades are coordinated, scheduled, and announced — so the permissionless validator set adopts them deliberately, not by surprise.
Scheduled.
An approved upgrade is given an activation point and published ahead of time, so operators can prepare and no one is caught mid-epoch.
Adopted.
Operators run the new client. Because the set is permissionless, adoption is a choice each operator makes — no central party can force or freeze a node.
Verifiable.
Scheduled upgrades and network health are visible on the status page, so the rollout is observed, not assumed.
The Foundation
Substantive governance lives with the Foundation.
This surface governs the protocol — network upgrades. The Council, the treasury, and the Mandate are the Foundation's, and we hand off there rather than duplicate them here.
Governance lives with the Foundation ↗
The Council's composition, the treasury, the grants process, and the Mandate that binds the network to its public purpose are stewarded by the Foundation. Read them at the source.
openstatestack.org/governance ↗
Why the split
Keeping protocol upgrades here and substantive governance with the Foundation keeps the two surfaces honest: the network surface stays operational, and the Mandate stays with the body accountable for it.Operate the network you help govern.
Network changes are open and reviewable. Run a node and take part, or watch the network run.