Submit a Proposal
If you have a final draft of your proposal ready to submit, you may want to push your proposal live on the testnet first. These are the three primary steps to getting your proposal live on-chain.
(Optional) Hosting supplementary materials for your proposal with IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)
Formatting the JSON file for the governance proposal transaction that will be on-chain
Sending the transaction that submits your governance proposal on-chain
Hosting supplementary materials
In general we try to minimize the amount of data pushed to the blockchain. Hence, detailed documentation about a proposal is usually hosted on a separate censorship resistant data-hosting platform, like IPFS.
Once you have drafted your proposal, ideally as a Markdown file, you can upload it to the IPFS network:
either by running an IPFS node and the IPFS software, or
using a service such as https://pinata.cloud
Ensure that you "pin" the file so that it continues to be available on the network. You should get a URL like this: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbkQNtCAdR1CNbFE8ujub2jcpwUcmSRpSCg8gVWrTHSWD
The value QmbkQNtCAdR1CNbFE8ujub2jcpwUcmSRpSCg8gVWrTHSWD
is called the CID
of your file - it is effectively the file's hash.
If you uploaded a markdown file, you can use the IPFS markdown viewer to render the document for better viewing. Links for the markdown viewer look like https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxdXBFca7D/example#/ipfs/<CID>
, where <CID>
is your CID. For instance the link above would be: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTk...HSWD
Share the URL with others and verify that your file is publicly accessible.
The reason we use IPFS is that it is a decentralized means of storage, making it resistant to censorship or single points of failure. This increases the likelihood that the file will remain available in the future.
Formatting the JSON file for the governance proposal
Many proposals allow for long form text to be included, usually under the key description
. These provide the opportunity to include markdown if formatted correctly as well as line breaks with.
Beware, however, that if you are using the CLI to create a proposal, and setting description
using a flag, the text will be escaped which may have undesired effects. If you're using markdown or line breaks it's recommended to put the proposal text into a json file and include that file as part of the CLI proposal, as opposed to individual fields in flags.
Text Proposals
TextProposal
s are used by delegators to agree to a certain strategy, plan, commitment, future upgrade, or any other statement in the form of text. Aside from having a record of the proposal outcome on the Blockx chain, a text proposal has no direct effect on BlockX.
Community Pool Spend Proposals
For community pool spend proposals, there are five components:
Title - the distinguishing name of the proposal, typically the way the that explorers list proposals
Description - the body of the proposal that further describes what is being proposed and details surrounding the proposal
Recipient - the BlockX (bech32-based) address that will receive funding from the Community Pool
Amount - the amount of funding that the recipient will receive
Deposit - the amount that will be contributed to the deposit from the account submitting the proposal
Made-Up Example
In this simple example (below), a network explorer will list the governance proposal as a CommunityPoolSpendProposal
. When an observer selects the proposal, they'll see the description. Not all explorers will show the recipient and amount, so ensure that you verify that the description aligns with the what the governance proposal is programmed to enact. If the description says that a certain address will receive a certain number of BCX, it should also be programmed to do that, but it's possible that that's not the case (accidentally or otherwise).
The amount
is 1000000000000000000abcx
. This is equal to 1 BCX, so recipient
address blockx1mx9nqk5agvlsvt2yc8259nwztmxq7zjq50mxkp
will receive 1 BCX if this proposal is passed.
The deposit
of 64000000000000000000abcx
results in 64 BCX being used from the proposal submitter's account. There is a minimum deposit required for a proposal to enter the voting period, and anyone may contribute to this deposit within a 5-day period. If the minimum deposit isn't reached before this time, the deposit amounts will be burned. Deposit amounts will also be burned if quorum isn't met in the vote or if the proposal is vetoed.
Params-Change Proposals
Changes to the gov
module are different from the other kinds of parameter changes because gov
has subkeys. Only the key
part of the JSON file is different for gov
parameter-change proposals.
For parameter-change proposals, there are seven components:
Title - the distinguishing name of the proposal, typically the way the that explorers list proposal
Description - the body of the proposal that further describes what is being proposed and details surrounding the proposal
Subspace - the BlockX module with the parameter that is being changed
Key - the parameter that will be changed
Value - the value of the parameter that will be changed by the governance mechanism
Denom - type of asset used as the deposit
Amount - the amount that will be contributed to the deposit from the account submitting the proposal
CLI
This is the command format for using blockxd
(the command-line interface) to submit your proposal on-chain:
Use the blockxd tx gov --help
flag to get more info about the governance commands
blockxd
is the command-line interface client that is used to send transactions and query BlockXtx gov submit-proposal param-change
indicates that the transaction is submitting a parameter-change proposal--from mykey
is the account key that pays the transaction fee and deposit amount--gas 500000
is the maximum amount of gas permitted to be used to process the transactionthe more content there is in the description of your proposal, the more gas your transaction will consume
if this number isn't high enough and there isn't enough gas to process your transaction, the transaction will fail
the transaction will only use the amount of gas needed to process the transaction
--gas-prices
is the flat-rate per unit of gas value for a validator to process your transaction--chain-id blockx_12346-1
is BlockX Mainnet. For current and past chain-id's, please look at the Chain ID documentation.--node
is using a full node to send the transaction to the BlockX Mainnet
Verifying your transaction
After posting your transaction, your command line interface (blockxd
) will provide you with the transaction's hash, which you can either query using blockxd
or by searching the transaction hash using Mintscan or any block explorer.
Depositing funds after a proposal has been submitted
Sometimes a proposal is submitted without having the minimum token amount deposited yet. In these cases you would want to be able to deposit more tokens to get the proposal into the voting stage. In order to deposit tokens, you'll need to know what your proposal ID is after you've submitted your proposal. You can query all proposals by the following command:
If there are a lot of proposals on the chain already, you can also filter by your own address. For the proposal above, that would be:
Once you have the proposal ID, this is the command to deposit extra tokens:
In our case above, the <proposal-id>
would be 59 as queried earlier. The <deposit>
is written as 500000abcx
, just like the example above.
Submit your proposal to the testnet
You may want to submit your proposal to the testnet chain before the mainnet for a number of reasons:
To see what the proposal description will look like
To signal that your proposal is about to go live on the mainnet
To share what the proposal will look like in advance with stakeholders
To test the functionality of the governance features
Submitting your proposal to the testnet increases the likelihood that you will discover a flaw before deploying your proposal on mainnet. A few things to keep in mind:
you'll need testnet tokens for your proposal (ask around for a faucet)
the parameters for testnet proposals are different (eg. voting period timing, deposit amount, deposit denomination)
the deposit denomination is in
'atbcx'
instead of'abcx'
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