17. Governance

Kortana features an on-chain parameter governance system that allows the protocol to evolve, adjust economic parameters, and respond to network conditions without requiring contentious hard forks.

17.1 ParamStore

Network parameters reside in the native ParamStore system contract located at reserved address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000102. The ParamStore maintains key-value pairs governing critical operational constants:

min_gas_price: The protocol floor for transaction gas pricing (1 gwei).
unbonding_delay_epochs: The mandatory unstaking lockup duration (168 epochs).
base_fee_max_change_bps: The maximum allowable EIP-1559 base fee adjustment per block (1250 bps / 12.5%).
slashing_fraction_downtime: Operational penalties for sustained downtime.

17.2 Proposal Lifecycle

Governance parameter modifications follow a rigorous four-stage lifecycle:

Submission (GovernancePropose, Type 0x34): An entity deposits a required DNR bond to submit a parameter update proposal specifying the target key and new value.
Voting Period (GovernanceVote, Type 0x35): Validators and token holders cast stake-weighted votes (yes, no, abstain) over an active voting window (e.g., 7 days).
Quorum & Supermajority: A proposal passes if at least 40% of total circulating stake participates and more than 66.7% of votes cast favor the change.
Timelock & Execution: Passed proposals enter a mandatory 48-hour timelock queue, allowing node operators to review the change before the ParamStore updates automatically at the designated activation height.

17.3 Parameters That Cannot Be Changed

[!WARNING] Core consensus invariants—such as the BFT 2f + 1 fault threshold, the SHA-256 dPOH hash count (600,000), and the supply conservation invariant—are hardcoded into the protocol and cannot be altered by governance. Changing these requires a hard fork.

Part V — Networking & Infrastructure

This section dives into the lowest layers of the Kortana protocol: how nodes discover and talk to each other securely, how pending transactions are managed, and how state is durably persisted to disk.