17. Governance

Kortana uses on-chain governance to manage protocol upgrades and parameters dynamically.

17.1 ParamStore

Economic constants (such as minimum gas prices, minimum stake amounts, and unbonding durations) are not hardcoded in the C++ binaries. They live in the ParamStore, a highly secure, read-only system contract space (0x...0102).

17.2 Proposal Lifecycle

1. GovernancePropose: An entity stakes DNR to propose a change to the ParamStore.
2. Voting Period: Validators and delegators vote on the proposal using GovernanceVote. Voting weight is strictly proportional to staked DNR.
3. Execution: If the threshold is met, the change is enacted automatically after a mandatory timelock.

17.3 Parameters That Cannot Be Changed

[!WARNING] Certain core consensus invariants—such as the BFT 2f+1 fault threshold, the SHA-256 dPOH hash count, and the maximum supply invariant—are hardcoded into the protocol and cannot be bypassed or 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.

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