Skip to main content

Hydration Council

The Hydration Council is an on-chain entity which plays a key role in the governance of the protocol. This article provides information on the composition of the Council, its main tasks, and the election of Council members.

For step-by-step guidance on how to participate in Council elections, please refer to this guide.

Composition​

The Hydration Council currently consists of 13 members.

A minority share of 6 seats is reserved for the founding team and the investors (4 founders + 2 investors).

The remaining 7 seats are elected by the wider community of HDX holders.

Tasks and Responsibilities​

The tasks of the Hydration Council cover a wide range of day-to-day governance activities. To begin with, the Council controls the Treasury and approves or rejects Treasury proposals.

The Hydration Council also plays a role in the referendum mechanism. The Council can initiate a referendum, provided that at least 60% of the members support this (super-majority) and no member exercises a veto. In the case of a veto, the proposal can be resubmitted after the cool-down period has lapsed. The vetoing member cannot veto the same proposal twice.

Furthermore, any proposed referendum can be cancelled with a 2/3 super-majority of the Council votes. This can be used as a last-resort measure to stop malicious proposals or changes which could introduce bugs in the code.

Finally, the Hydration Council is responsible for electing the Technical Committee.

Elections​

Any holder of HDX tokens can apply for one of the 7 non-permanent sets of the Hydration Council as a candidate.

The Council elections take place every 7 days, at which point an algorithm fills the 7 non-permanent Council seats for the duration of the following 7 days. The democracy module uses the same Phragmen algorithm which is used to elect the active set of validators on the Polkadot Relay Chain.

All community members can vote in the Council elections by locking a certain amount of HDX tokens of their choice. Locked tokens are not available for transfer and will be used in the follow-up elections (until cancelled). Voters can and should select more than one candidate in order of preference. The election algorithm then distributes all votes to determine the optimal allocation of the available Council seats to the candidates with the highest community backing.