The Voting Process¶

Periods¶

The voting procedure works as follows:

• Proposal period: delegates can submit protocol amendment proposals using the proposals operation. At the end of a proposal period, the proposal with most supporters is selected and we move to a testing_vote period. If there are no proposals, or a tie between proposals, a new proposal period starts. Each delegate can submit a maximum of 20 proposals, including duplicates.
• Testing_vote period: delegates can cast one vote to test or not the winning proposal using the ballot operation. At the end of a testing_vote period if participation reaches the quorum and the proposal has a super-majority in favor, we proceed to a testing period. Otherwise we go back to a proposal period.
• Testing period: a test chain is forked for 48 hours to test a correct migration of the context. At the end of a testing period we move to a promotion_vote period.
• Promotion_vote period: delegates can cast one vote to promote or not the tested proposal using the ballot operation. At the end of a promotion_vote period if participation reaches the quorum and the tested proposal has a super-majority in favor, it is activated as the new protocol. Otherwise we go back to a proposal period.

It is important to note that the stake of each delegated is computed at the beginning of each period.

Super-majority and Quorum¶

Both voting periods work in the same way, only the subject of the vote differs. During a vote a delegate can cast a single Yea, Nay or Pass vote. A vote is successful if it has super-majority and the participation reaches the current quorum.

Super-majority means the Yeas are more than 8/10 of Yeas+Nays votes. The participation is the ratio of all received votes, including passes, with respect to the number of possible votes. The quorum starts at 80% and at each vote it is updated using the old quorum and the current participation with the following coefficients:

newQ = oldQ * 8/10 + participation * 2/10

More details can be found in the file src/proto_alpha/lib_protocol/src/amendment.ml.

Operations¶

There are two operations used by the delegates: proposals and ballot. A proposal operation can only be submitted during a proposal period.

Proposals : {
  source: Signature.Public_key_hash.t ;
  period: Voting_period_repr.t ;
  proposals: Protocol_hash.t list ; }

Source is the public key hash of the delegate, period is the unique identifier of each voting period and proposals is a non-empty list of maximum 20 protocol hashes. The operation can be submitted more than once but only as long as the cumulative length of the proposals lists is less than 20.

A ballot operation can only be submitted during one of the voting periods, and only once per period.

Ballot : {
  source: Signature.Public_key_hash.t ;
  period: Voting_period_repr.t ;
  proposal: Protocol_hash.t ;
  ballot: Vote_repr.ballot ; }

Source and period are the same as above, while proposal is the currently selected proposal and ballot is one of Yea, Nay or Pass. The pass vote allows a delegate to not influence a vote but still allowing it to reach quorum.

More details can be found, as for all operations, in src/proto_alpha/lib_protocol/src/operation_repr.ml. The binary format is described by tezos-client describe unsigned operation.

Client Commands¶

Tezos’ client provides a command to show the status of a voting period. It displays different informations for different kind of periods, as in the following samples:

$ tezos-client show voting period
Current period: "proposal"
Blocks remaining until end of period: 59
Current proposals:
PsNa6jTtsRfbGaNSoYXNTNM5A7c3Lji22Yf2ZhpFUjQFC17iZVp 400

$ tezos-client show voting period
Current period: "testing_vote"
Blocks remaining until end of period: 63
Current proposal: PsNa6jTtsRfbGaNSoYXNTNM5A7c3Lji22Yf2ZhpFUjQFC17iZVp
Ballots: { "yay": 400, "nay": 0, "pass": 0 }
Current participation 20.00%, necessary quorum 80.00%
Current in favor 400, needed supermajority 320

$ tezos-client show voting period
Current period: "testing"
Blocks remaining until end of period: 64
Current proposal: PsNa6jTtsRfbGaNSoYXNTNM5A7c3Lji22Yf2ZhpFUjQFC17iZVp

It should be noted that the number 400 above is a number of rolls. The proposal has a total of 400 rolls, which may come from several delegates. The same applies for the ballots, there are 400 rolls in favor of testing protocol PsNa6jTt.

tezos-client submit proposals for <delegate> <proposal1> <proposal2> ...

tezos-client submit ballot for <delegate> <proposal> <yay|nay|pass>