Signaling Proposal - Permissionless ICS

Description

This is a Signaling Proposal for the Cosmos Hub to update Interchain Security (ICS) to be fully permissionless. Prior steps in the CHIPs process can be found on the Cosmos Hub forum:

• Discussion Phase post
• Signaling Phase post

Permissionless Launches & Chain Owner Accounts

The current release of ICS still uses a governance proposal to create consumer chains.

Permissionless ICS will allow anyone to create an opt-in consumer chain, without a governance proposal. This will allow chains to launch more quickly and with less friction.

With this new system, opt-in consumer chains are first registered with a single transaction, then can be initialized with another transaction. After this, settings can be changed with a third transaction (if needed). Once the spawn time has been reached and at least one validator has opted in, the consumer chain is launched.

This update also brings in the concept of a consumer chain owner. This is an account that is able to modify settings of the consumer chain. This can be a single account, a DAO, or even the consumer chain’s governance over an interchain account. This concept will allow for a lot of flexibility in the administration and launch of consumer chains. Here are some ways this could be used:

• The development/community DAO of a pre-launch consumer chain sets the spawn time to start the chain once development is complete and enough validators have opted in.
• A consumer chain’s on-chain governance modifies the consumer chain’s DenyList to exclude exchange validators.
• A consumer chain’s governance raises the ValidatorNumberCap to let more validators into its active set.

Technical details

The ADR contains a very complete specification of the protocol and required code changes, but we’ve included two diagrams below to illustrate some of the concepts.

Proposal Outcomes

The following items summarize the voting options and what they mean for this proposal:

Upon a YES vote:

• Permissionless ICS will be added to the Hub in a future upgrade

Upon a NO vote:

• Permissionless ICS as detailed in this proposal will not be added to the Hub and the discussions with the community will continue to find the best path forward to introduce Permissionless ICS

NO WITH VETO - A ‘NoWithVeto’ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned

ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal