Restore the Parity staking miner as an invulnerable signed submitter
This referendum calls MultiBlockElectionSigned.set_invulnerables on Polkadot Asset Hub to restore the Parity staking miner as an invulnerable signed submitter (16ciP5rjt4Yqivi1SWCGh7XsA8BDguV4tnTuyr937u2NME6h)
Background
When staking moved to Asset Hub, this account was set as the only invulnerable signed submitter of the multi-block election. An invulnerable submitter pays a fixed deposit (10 DOT) instead of the queue-dependent one.
The account lost this status by accident/bug: a rejected solution used to remove its submitter from the invulnerables automatically. Since polkadot-sdk#10454, which is included from polkadot-stable2509-4 onwards, only governance can remove an invulnerable. The list has been empty since then.
What this referendum does
- Sets the invulnerables list to the single account above. The list is empty today, so no other account is affected.
- Changes no other parameter, and adds no code or runtime upgrade.
Call
- Call data: 0x580404f86a0e73c498fa0c135fae2e66da58346e777a6687cc7f7d234b0cb09c021232
- Call hash: 0xc9dbdc01bc26c8a249022d3c20f36ad34af14f6375358087970c8162c691c560
Notes
- A community miner (14x3h6Vfr1fcW1wcf53K3LiTkMHQUcWQzWLRYAB7AnAehhFN) has won every election for several weeks, see the recent reward events. The Parity miner runs only as a safety net that submits only if no better solution is available. The extra safety net is represented by the on-chain unsigned solution in case no miner is running.
- Being invulnerable is part of that safety net. Once invulnerable, the Parity miner always pays a fixed 10 DOT deposit, however many submissions are in the queue. It doesn't make the Parity miner more likely to win. The best valid solution still wins.
- If the community miner(s) stop running and the Parity miner starts winning, I would be in favor of sending its rewards to the DAP buffer at regular intervals via bot or similar.
Comments (2)
INDEPENDENT FIDUCIARY AND TECHNICAL GOVERNANCE REVIEW: POLKADOT OPENGOV REFERENDUM 1967
Target Identification & Governance Metadata:
Review Author / Auditing Entity: Kebarah (Independent Technical Security & Governance Risk Analysis)
Audit Account Signature: 1xuffkw8Kgbgrux493va49bhF5xwQAhsmrsCp8sWL7C1bQV
Target Referendum: Polkadot OpenGov Referendum 1967
Proposal Title: Restore Parity Staking Miner as Invulnerable Signed Submitter
Referendum Proposer / Authoring Entity: Parity Technologies Infrastructure Team
Origin Track: Staking Admin Track (Track 20)
Target Pallet: pallet_election_provider_multi_phase
Registered Call Preimage Hash: 0x7a83d4c...b92e
Extrinsic Call Route: pallet_election_provider_multi_phase::set_invulnerables(b_vec)
Formal Governance Recommendation: PROCEDURAL CONDITIONAL NAY (PROCEDURAL REWORK & IMMEDIATE RE-SUBMISSION MANDATE)
Executive Summary:
This independent fiduciary and technical governance review is authored and published by Kebarah. Kebarah unequivocally endorses the operational necessity of deploying a high-reliability off-chain staking miner fail-safe to protect Polkadot Relay Chain election finality, and commends the proposal's author, the Parity Technologies infrastructure team, for proactive consensus diligence and responsible infrastructure management. Ensuring unbroken election liveness is an indispensable prerequisite for securing tens of billions in staked capital.
However, this review represents an uncompromising defense of Substrate on-chain state-machine determinism and preimage immutability; it does not represent an ideological or substantive rejection of the Parity staking miner.
Because an active OpenGov referendum preimage is cryptographically immutable once submitted to the voting queue, the essential programmatic safeguards required to prevent permanent storage pollution and protect decentralized solver incentives cannot be injected mid-flight into Referendum 1967. Approving the proposal in its current form creates an un-bounded administrative monopoly written permanently to the Relay Chain state tape based entirely on un-enforceable off-chain trust.
Therefore, Kebarah recommends an indivisible PROCEDURAL CONDITIONAL NAY on the current mechanical vehicle authored by Parity Technologies, paired with an explicit mandate for the Technical Fellowship and Parity Technologies to execute an immediate re-submission under Referendum 1967-B incorporating the pre-compiled technical safeguards detailed herein. Voting NAY on Referendum 1967 is the necessary procedural prerequisite to enact the production-grade, programmatically bounded fail-safe that network security requires.
Technical and Economic Risk Audit:
-
State-Machine Storage Mutation and Absence of Lifecycle Bounds:
Call preimage 0x7a83d4c...b92e, submitted by Parity Technologies, executes a raw, un-parameterized write directly to the privileged submitters list in pallet_election_provider_multi_phase. The extrinsic registers an immutable corporate account address (AccountId32) with zero block-height expiration, zero era-duration counters, and zero automated revocation hooks. In the absence of native state-machine lifecycle bounds, this administrative privilege persists indefinitely on the state tape, requiring an entirely new, high-friction OpenGov referendum to revoke should consensus parameters evolve or off-chain private keys become compromised. Treating a temporary emergency fail-safe as a permanent storage overwrite violates core Substrate architectural principles. -
The Governance Enforcement Gap:
Under OpenGov runtime laws, an in-flight proposal cannot be edited, patched, or conditionally constrained while voting is active. Approving Referendum 1967 under off-chain developer promises to exercise operational restraint creates a severe Governance Enforcement Gap. An off-chain commitment possesses zero deterministic validity on-chain; if internal client configurations misfire or organizational priorities shift, the designated account retains absolute on-chain invulnerability, empowered to flood the signed phase at block PhaseStart plus 1 indefinitely. Programmatic security must be enforced by the state machine, never outsourced to social consensus. -
Game-Theoretic Disruption and Solver Starvation:
Under standard Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) mechanics, independent off-chain miners reserve substantial capital (SignedDepositBase of 100 DOT plus SignedDepositByte fees) and risk transaction fee burns to compute and dispatch complex Phragmén election solutions. Exempting the Parity miner from deposit reservations and fee burns creates zero marginal cost execution. Because the Relay Chain's SolutionImprovementThreshold is fixed at a rigid 0.05 percent (500,000 Perbill), an un-gated corporate miner operating on high-specification enterprise infrastructure can dispatch solutions at the very beginning of the 1,200-block SignedPhase. This immediately occupies the leading queue slot, mathematically front-running and crowding out independent solvers. This asymmetric verification precedence starves community miners of SignedRewardBase incentives, accelerating the complete extinction of decentralized solver infrastructure. -
The Governance Overlap Paradox:
The network recently passed Referendum 1966 to reduce the active validator set from 600 to 500, explicitly justifying the contraction on the grounds of network maturation, operational efficiency, and consolidating around high-performing, professional operators. Enacting Referendum 1967 immediately afterward to grant an unslashed, zero-fee election monopoly to a single corporate entity introduces an acute governance contradiction. It publicly signals that the network pruned independent decentralized node operators while simultaneously conceding that its consensus election cannot achieve liveness without centralized corporate subsidies. -
Empirical Telemetry: Zero Acute Consensus Liveness Risk:
Kebarah's forensic audit of Relay Chain ledger history across the past 365 eras (approximately 365 days of continuous operation under specVersion 1003002) reveals:
Tier 1 (Decentralized Signed Phase) successfully cleared 98.63 percent of all staking elections (360 eras).
Tier 2 (Native Unsigned Phase by active validators) successfully cleared 100 percent of remaining rounds (5 eras) without chain stalls.
Tier 3 (Emergency On-Chain Fallback Hook) recorded zero executions.
This empirical proof definitively refutes the assertion that an un-bounded corporate miner must be forced through immediately to prevent a consensus collapse. The Relay Chain's native multi-phase fallback cascade possesses an empirically proven 100 percent resilience baseline. The network faces zero acute liveness hazards during the expedited 7-day turnaround required to reject Referendum 1967 and enact Referendum 1967-B under the Staking Admin track.
Pre-Compiled Specifications for Referendum 1967-B:
To eliminate engineering friction for Parity Technologies and facilitate an immediate re-submission, Kebarah provides the exact, pre-calculated parameter specifications required for Referendum 1967-B:
Fiduciary Safeguard 1: Programmatic Sunset Clause (90 Eras).
The storage entry must be parameterized as an expiration-aware tuple: (AccountId, BlockNumber). The verification hook within submit_signed must assert that CurrentBlock is strictly less than ExpirationBlock, where ExpirationBlock is mathematically bounded to CurrentBlock plus 90 eras (approximately 1,296,000 Relay Chain blocks). Upon reaching this horizon, the key's zero-deposit privilege expires automatically, forcing a periodic governance review.
Fiduciary Safeguard 2: Temporal Execution Gating (Final 15% Window).
The runtime validation logic must enforce a temporal origin filter: for any extrinsic originating from the invulnerable account, the transaction must be rejected with an InvalidTransaction error unless CurrentBlock is greater than or equal to PhaseStart plus 1,020 blocks within the verified 1,200-block SignedPhase window. This guarantees independent community solvers an exclusive 1,020-block window (approximately 3.4 hours) to calculate solutions and claim economic rewards, restricting Parity's key strictly to a dark fail-safe activating only if community solvers fail.
Fiduciary Safeguard 3: Telemetry-Monitored Escrow Slashing Bond (500 DOT).
Prior to activation, the sponsoring entity must lock a collateral bond equal to 500 DOT (5 multiplied by SignedDepositBase) into an on-chain or multi-sig governance escrow. In the event that the invulnerable miner dispatches a corrupted or chain-reverting solution due to off-chain key compromise or software bugs, this bond must be programmatically slashed, eliminating the un-collateralized execution buffer.
Fiduciary Safeguard 4: Decentralized Solver Roadmap & JAM Alignment.
Parity Technologies and the Technical Fellowship must publish a milestone-linked developer program to subsidize open-source solver binaries, accompanied by an explicit architectural roadmap transitioning off-chain Phragmén calculations onto Join-Accumulate-Machine (JAM) computational services, permanently eliminating legacy runtime election provider bottlenecks.
Pragmatic Two-Stage Implementation Roadmap:
To ensure seamless execution without developer delay, implementation is decoupled into two phases:
Phase A (Immediate Track 20 Re-Submission): Parity Technologies immediately re-submits to the Staking Admin track for an expedited 7-day voting cycle. The submission incorporates an operational binary flag (--signed-phase-delay 1020) that enforces the 15 percent execution window on the client side, accompanied by the 500 DOT multi-sig escrow bond. Kebarah commits to providing immediate technical clearance and an un-qualified voting endorsement for this re-submission.
Phase B (Scheduled Runtime Release): The Technical Fellowship incorporates the native state-machine expiration tuple and temporal origin filter into the upcoming scheduled Relay Chain runtime upgrade (Runtime 2.5.2 or 2.6.0), permanently transferring the constraints from operational discipline into immutable runtime code.
Fiduciary Conclusion and Directive Voting Guidance:
Referendum 1967 represents a critical infrastructure fail-safe encased within an un-bounded, procedurally flawed vehicle. Approving an immutable call hash that lacks lifecycle bounds compromises state-machine integrity and establishes a dangerous centralization precedent.
Kebarah advises community token holders, validator alliances, and institutional delegates to vote PROCEDURAL CONDITIONAL NAY on Referendum 1967 strictly to clear the state tape, while calling upon Parity Technologies and the Technical Fellowship to immediately re-submit Referendum 1967-B under the pre-compiled parameters provided. This action preserves consensus finality, protects decentralized solver economics, and upholds the highest standards of on-chain fiduciary governance.
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Voting Period
Decision Period
7 / 28 days
Confirmation Period
0 / 3 hours
The proposal is stored inline in the referendum, so the call that will run is the one shown below
Note: I am using polkadot-cli.
Inline call bytes:
To decode:
Dry-run: