Governance
Stewardship, not speculation.
NEN governance is designed to reward long-term alignment over short-term capture. Conviction voting weights time, quadratic funding weights breadth, and timelocks protect against capture by any single actor.
Conviction voting
Voting power grows with hold time. Whales can't dominate; long-term stewards can.
Quadratic funding
Treasury grants are matched by breadth of support, not size of donor.
Timelocks
48-hour delay on every executed action. Anyone can review what's queued.
Progressive decentralization
Multi-sig safeguards in year one, retired as the system stabilizes.
In plain English
What those terms actually mean
Two ideas do most of the work in NEN governance. Here's the no-jargon version.
Conviction voting
Patience is power.
Your voting weight on a proposal grows the longer you keep your tokens staked behind it. A whale who shows up at the last minute carries less weight than a smaller holder who has backed the idea for weeks. There's no fixed deadline — once the total conviction behind a proposal crosses a threshold, it passes. Pull your support and your conviction decays at the same rate it built.
Why it matters: Rewards long-term alignment over flash mobs and last-minute vote buying.
Quadratic funding
Breadth beats depth.
When the treasury matches community donations to a project, the match is calculated so that many small contributions count for far more than a few large ones. A grant backed by 100 people giving $1 each receives a much bigger match than one backed by a single person giving $100. The math: match scales with the square of the sum of square-roots of contributions.
Why it matters: Directs treasury funds to what the community actually wants, not what the wealthiest few want.
Conviction simulator
Move the controls and watch how time, not size, drives voting power.
Conviction grows toward a ceiling of 10,607 with 1,000 NEN staked. Withdraw early and conviction decays at the same rate it accrued — there's no shortcut for time.
Quadratic funding calculator
A 10,000 NEN matching pool, split by community support — not donor size.
Notice how the project with the most supporters tends to dominate the match, even when its raised amount is smaller. That's the core of quadratic funding: the pool follows breadth of support, not the depth of any single donor.
Proposal lifecycle
From idea to execution
Every change to the protocol — parameters, treasury spend, contract upgrades — flows through the same six stages.
- 01Temperature check
Informal discussion in the forum. Anyone can post.
Forum (Discourse) - 02Signal vote
Off-chain conviction voting via Snapshot. Non-binding but weighted by held NEN + reputation.
- 03Proposal draft
Formal NIP (NEN Improvement Proposal) with spec, rationale, and risk analysis.
- 04On-chain vote
Tally / OZ Governor execution. Quorum + supermajority for parameter changes.
- 05Timelock
48-hour delay before execution — anyone can review the queued action.
- 06Execution
Action executes automatically on-chain. No admin can short-circuit.
Tooling
Standard, well-audited governance stack — no bespoke voting code on the critical path.
- DiscoursePublic forum for temperature checks and NIP drafts.
- SnapshotOff-chain signal voting weighted by held NEN.
- Tally + OZ GovernorOn-chain proposal execution with timelock.
- Sablier / HedgeyStreaming grants and vesting for funded contributors.
Treasury
15% of genesis supply is allocated to the Stewardship Treasury. All flows are on-chain and human-readable.