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Polymesh’s on-chain governance framework prevents forks and supports coordinated evolution.
Contentious forks in the chain present significant legal and tax challenges for tokens backed by real assets.
Polymesh uses an industry–led governance model to prevent hard forks and guide the evolution of the chain.
Governance is a critical challenge for any blockchain, but especially one underpinning real world assets. For tokenized assets, forks can create conflicting sources of truth, causing legal ambiguity, tax complications, and compliance failures.
Most general-purpose chains rely on informal governance or token voting, which lacks sufficient coordination and accountability for regulated assets.
Polymesh addresses governance challenges by building governance into its core. Runtime upgrades are forkless by design, and potential disputes are resolved through an appointed Governance Council composed of key stakeholders.
The Governance Council is composed of key stakeholders who review Polymesh Improvement Proposals (PIPs) submitted by committees or token holders. The Governance Council finds consensus and charts a path forward for the future development of the chain.
POLYX holders have the opportunity to influence the direction of the Polymesh blockchain by submitting a Polymesh Improvement Proposal (PIP) through Polymesh Governance, or by signalling on proposals submitted by others. Approved proposals will be voted on by the Polymesh Governing Council for implementation.
Any POLYX holder has the right to submit a PIP by submitting detailed information regarding the change and bonding POLYX to the PIP.
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Polymesh builds governance into the core of the chain, relying on a council of stakeholders—known as the Governance Council—to guide network evolution while protecting against disruptions that compromise regulatory certainty.
Any POLYX token holder can submit community-curated PIPs and engage other holders so they can signal their approval or disapproval.
Committees are groups of individuals with up to 20 members, categorized by topics. Committees can submit committee PIPs, which are similar to community-curated PIPs except they cannot be signaled on and can be enacted at any time in any order by the Governing Council.
As the decision–making body of Polymesh, the primary role of the Governing Council is to manage the blockchain, find consensus, and chart a direction for development. The Council has authority over enacting proposals, managing committee membership, and implementing emergency changes.
Currently, membership in the Committees and Governing Council is not mutually exclusive, meaning members can belong to both at the same time.
More on Governance
Governance on Polymesh is structured to resolve potential disagreements while maintaining continuity for regulated and real world assets.
Upgrade decisions are coordinated by the governance framework and executed seamlessly using on-chain logic embedded in the node runtime. As node runtime is stored directly on-chain, upgrades lead to changes in the on-chain representation of the runtime. Every node checks if there is a new runtime, and if there is, begins working with that version automatically. The possibility of non-malicious hard forks is therefore highly unlikely.
Built on the Substrate Framework, Polymesh allows for forkless runtime upgrades which allow for seamless upgrades on the blockchain and on-chain recording and storage of governance information. Any change to the blockchain is recorded directly on-chain. This is convenient from a chain management standpoint and enables the possibility for users to have a say in chain management through a user-friendly interface, the governance dApp.
Used for the protocol runtime, WebAssembly (WASM) adds to the improbability of hard forks. Its bytecode was initially conceived to enable high-performance applications on webpages, which is why software companies maintain WASM compilers and virtual machines for various operating system platforms. This landscape makes the risk of hard forks caused by compiler or platform bugs highly unlikely.
