Overview

The Wish for Change (WFC) referendum is part of a series of referendums aimed at probing token holders' sentiment regarding proposed updates to Polkadot's economic parameters. The key changes include implementing a fixed treasury inflow, removing the adjustment of staking rewards based on the discrepancy between the ideal staking rate and the actual staking rate, and potentially reducing overall inflation.

There has been extensive discussions in the community about this topic leading up to these referenda. Here is a reading list:

1. Implementing a fixed treasury inflow
2. Necessary upgrades to allow for governance changes of inflation
3. Livestream with discussion on inflation
4. Forum discussion on inflation

Rules

• Only a WFC that is executed can be considered a candidate (i.e., it must be gathering enough approval).
• If one or more WFCs are accepted, the one with more AYE votes (weighted with conviction) is considered the preferred candidate.
• Ideally, WFCs should be run mostly in parallel.

Important

The WFC referendum cannot be binding, i.e., there is no mechanism to force the chain to update the parameters to the one specified in the WFC. Instead, it is a method to aggregate the opinion of voters through OpenGov and offers some commitment of the community to one WFC on the social layer.

Ways forward

The goal is to put forward a root referendum after the WFCs ended that implement the logic of the winning WFC. The proposed parameters in each WFC would achieve their goals but it might be that it's more efficient to implement the code otherwise. Importantly, we agree on the outcome as stated in the REMARK of the winning referendum.

This WFC

Voting AYE for this proposal expresses your approval of setting a 8% total inflation on a fixed total issuance (potentially the total issuance at the time of the execution of the root referendum), diverting a fixed 15% of that to the Treasury. This will effectively lead to a constant issuance in DOT leading to a gradually decreasing inflation over time.

The following parameters would achieve that (note that there might be better ways to do it):

MaxStakerReward: 85%
max_inflation: configured to start at 8%, then decreasing
min_inflation: equal to staker inflation

REMARK: 8% constant total inflation (on a fixed total issuance) with 15% to Treasury