Token-Weighted Governance
Governance in SURCHI is token-weighted: your voting power is proportional to your staked SURCHI balance. One staked SURCHI equals one vote. Unstaked tokens do not carry governance rights — staking is required both to vote and to submit proposals. This design ensures that governance is controlled by long-term aligned participants, not by wallets that can accumulate tokens, vote, and exit without bearing the consequences of their decisions. Time-weighted multipliers reward consistent long-term stakers with enhanced voting weight relative to recent stakers of the same token quantity. This further aligns governance power with genuine long-term commitment to the protocol. Proposal threshold — submitting a formal on-chain proposal requires a minimum staked balance. This threshold prevents spam proposals and ensures that formal governance actions reflect a meaningful stake in the outcome. The current threshold is published in the governance dashboard and is itself a governance-adjustable parameter.What Token Holders Control
The SURCHI DAO has binding authority over the following protocol domains:- Protocol fee parameters — the execution fee percentage, API pricing tiers, and subscription pricing for premium access. Any changes to how the protocol charges for its services require DAO approval.
- Treasury fund allocation — all deployments of Community Reserve funds, including grants, development spending, partnerships, and ecosystem programs.
- AI model update approvals — significant updates to the underlying intelligence models powering the three Sentinels are subject to DAO review. This includes changes to signal generation methodology and execution logic.
- New feature activations — new protocol capabilities, integrations with external protocols, and expansions to the Sentinel permission model require governance approval before activation.
- Emergency protocol pauses — in the event of a critical vulnerability or market event, the DAO can vote to pause specific protocol functions while a response is coordinated.
Proposal Process
All governance decisions follow a structured process designed to balance speed with deliberation:Community Discussion
All proposals begin as informal discussions in the SURCHI governance forum. The community debates the proposal, surfaces concerns, suggests amendments, and builds (or fails to build) consensus before anything goes on-chain. This step is not time-limited — proposals move to on-chain submission when the submitter judges sufficient discussion has occurred.
Formal On-Chain Proposal Submission
The proposal author submits a formal on-chain proposal using the governance interface. Submission requires meeting the minimum stake threshold. The proposal includes a title, full specification, and — where applicable — executable instructions (smart contract calls) that will be triggered automatically if the vote passes.
Voting Period
Once submitted, the proposal enters a seven-day voting period. All staked SURCHI holders may vote For, Against, or Abstain. Votes are weighted by staked balance with time-multiplier adjustments. The voting period cannot be shortened, even if an early supermajority is reached.
Implementation
If the proposal reaches quorum (minimum participation threshold) and a simple majority votes For, the proposal passes. Executable proposals are implemented automatically via on-chain execution. Non-executable proposals (parameter changes, treasury grants) are implemented by the protocol multisig within a defined implementation window, verifiable on-chain.
Governance is currently in progressive decentralization. Some protocol parameters remain under time-locked multisig control during the early protocol phase as security infrastructure matures. See Decentralization Roadmap for the full transition timeline and milestones.