This is a signaling proposal for the introduction of expedited proposals on the Cosmos Hub. Expedited proposals can have shorter voting durations and a higher tally threshold. If an expedited proposal fails to meet the threshold within the shorter voting duration, then it is converted to a regular proposal and voting restarts under regular voting conditions. Expedited proposals were introduced in Cosmos SDK v0.50, which means they will need to be backported to the special branch of Cosmos SDK v0.47 used by the Cosmos Hub.

There are several use cases for expedited proposals, such as fraud resolutions or participating in Neutron governance, that will be addressed by future signaling proposals. An immediate use case is reducing the voting duration of Software Upgrade proposals and, consequently, speed up the Cosmos Hub upgrade process. We propose to expedite Software Upgrade proposals to one week with the tally threshold set to 66.7% (the default for expedited proposals). Note that all previous proposals starting with the v8 upgrade passed with at least 99% Yes votes.

Expedited Proposal Parameters

Backporting the expedited proposal feature from SDK 0.50 would enable any proposal to be submitted as an expedited proposal. There are three system params that can be set for expedited proposals:

• ExpeditedVotingPeriod – Duration of the voting period of an expedited proposal. Our suggestion is to set it to one week.
• ExpeditedThreshold – Minimum proportion of Yes votes for an expedited proposal to pass. Our suggestion is to set it to the default value of 0.67.
• ExpeditedMinDeposit – Minimum deposit for an expedited proposal to enter voting period. Our suggestion is to set it to 500 ATOMs.

In addition to the backport, we will add an ante handler in Gaia to expedite only certain proposals. Our current proposal is only to allow SoftwareUpgrades to be expedited.

Proposal Outcomes

The following items summarize the voting options and what they mean for this proposal:

Upon a YES vote:

• The voting period for Software Upgrade governance proposals will be changed to one week in the next Cosmos Hub upgrade.

Upon a NO vote:

• The voting period for Software Upgrade governance proposals will remain unchanged (i.e., two weeks).

NO WITH VETO - A ‘NoWithVeto’ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned

ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal

References

• Cosmos SDK docs: https://docs.cosmos.network/v0.50/build/modules/gov#expedited-proposals