What is a Governance Action?

Note: This content is taken directly from CIP-1694

We define seven different types of governance actions. A governance action is an on-chain event that is triggered by a transaction and has a deadline after which it cannot be enacted.

• An action is said to be ratified when it gathers enough votes in its favor (through the rules and parameters that are detailed below).

• An action that fails to be ratified before its deadline is said to have expired.

• An action that has been ratified is said to be enacted once it has been activated on the network.

Action	Description
1. Motion of no-confidence	A motion to create a state of no-confidence in the current constitutional committee
2. New constitutional committee and/or threshold and/or terms	Changes to the members of the constitutional committee and/or to its signature threshold and/or terms
3. Update to the Constitution or proposal policy	A modification to the Constitution or proposal policy, recorded as on-chain hashes
4. Hard-Fork2 Initiation	Triggers a non-backwards compatible upgrade of the network; requires a prior software upgrade
5. Protocol Parameter Changes	Any change to one or more updatable protocol parameters, excluding changes to major protocol versions ("hard forks")
6. Treasury Withdrawals	Withdrawals from the treasury
7. Info	An action that has no effect on-chain, other than an on-chain record

Any Ada holder can submit a governance action to the chain. They must provide a deposit of govActionDeposit Lovelace, which will be returned when the action is finalized (whether it is ratified or has expired). The deposit amount will be added to the deposit pot, similar to stake key deposits. It will also be counted towards the stake of the reward address it will be paid back to, to not reduce the submitter's voting power to vote on their own (and competing) actions.

If a proposal policy is present, the transaction must include that policy in the witness set either directly, or via reference inputs, and any other requirements that the proposal policy makes must be satisfied.

Note that a motion of no-confidence is an extreme measure that enables Ada holders to revoke the power that has been granted to the current constitutional committee.