Governance & Operations

Pilgrim Protocol is not built and operated by any centralized party; rather, it is controlled by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governed by xPIL holders and stakers.

The Pilgrim DAO has control over the following:

• Smart contract upgrades. If changes are required to Pilgrim Protocol's smart contracts due to a feature upgrade or a bug fix, they must go through a DAO governance vote. However, in cases of an emergency (e.g. stolen funds due to an exploit), a delegated set of signers voted upon by the DAO may immediately migrate the contracts through a Timelock contract.

• Parameter amendments. Amendments to any parameters refered to by Pilgrim's smart contracts must go through a DAO governance vote to be executed.

• PIL reward adjustments. Allocating additional PIL rewards to a particular protocol or NFT project must go through a DAO governance vote to be executed, similar to the Curve Gauge.

• Protocol treasury spending and token mints. Spending PIL tokens from the Community Pool, the Protocol Treasury, or funds held by Pilgrim-related smart contracts must go through a DAO governance vote to be executed. The DAO may also vote for additional PIL token mints by agreeing to migrate underlying Pilgrim contracts first, and then posting another spending proposal to spend those newly minted tokens.

• New deployments. Deploying Pilgrim Protocol to any other blockchain that is not currently deployed, or requests for funding to port and deploy Pilgrim Protocol to non-EVM based blockchains must go through a DAO governance vote to be executed.

• Any other topic of discussion that requires community consensus. Any other topics of discussion that are not listed above but require community consensus must go through a DAO governence vote for discussion.

During the early days of the protocol, Pilgrim's smart contracts may be held by a multisig with a Timelock setup for faster development work and effecient bootstrapping. Once the protocol is deemed stabilized, DAO members may request for smart contract ownership to be migrated to the Pilgrim DAO, of which will then have complete ownership over any action taken on Pilgrim's smart contract code.

Standard governance process

The Pilgrim DAO employs the following processes for effective community coordination.

• Signaling. The proposer must demonstrate that there is enough interest for a proposal within the community. This may include opening a discussion thread on Pilgrim's Discord, or writing a new topic on our discussion forum.

• Gather preliminary votes. After enough interest is demonstrated on public places of discussion, the proposer must gather preliminary votes before bringing the proposal on-chain. This should be done with off-chain voting solutions, such as Snapshot, which allows for xPIL token holders to signify their interest for a particular topic. This proposal should also follow a formal and standardized format explaining why their proposal is justified, ideally with the PILIP (PILgrim Improvement Proposals) template provided by the Pilgrim DAO.

• On-chain voting. Once a proposal is sufficiently finalized, has gone through thorough discussion, and gathered enough support from the community off-chain, the proposer should bring the proposal on-chain for execution. If the proposal may be executed directly on-chain (i.e. contract upgrades, parameter amendments, reward adjustments, treasury spending, etc.), changes should be applied immediately after the on-chain proposal passes. Otherwise, the DAO has an obligation to execute what was explained with the on-chain proposal in text.