Inter Protocol MVP Contract Governance

Governance
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The Inter Protocol’s day to day governance is led by an group of representatives (the “Economic Committee” or “EC”) elected Sep 2022 in proposal 15 who take action on behalf of the BLD stakers (BLDer DAO). The EC has direct control of contract parameters and also retains the ability to pause contract functions as a disaster response.

This post outlines the specific capabilities of the Econ Committee in the proposed Inter Protocol MVP.

Parity Stability Module Contract Architecture within Inter Protocol

On launch, the Parity Stability Module (PSM) contract code will be installed on chain and can be instantiated multiple times. Each PSM contract deals with a single external asset in exchange for IST. An ‘asset’ is defined as a single denomination within Cosmos - i.e., USDC bridged through Axelar to Agoric is a different asset than USDC bridged through Gravity to Agoric, and requires a different PSM.

Each PSM contract instantiated - and there may be many to support multiple asset/bridge combinations - is governed separately by the EC. A parameter change or function pause on one contract will not affect any other contract.

External stablecoin assets held by PSM contracts are referred to in the code as “Anchor” as they are the assets which anchor the IST price. Conversely, IST is referred to in the code as “Minted” as it is the asset minted by the protocol.

PSM Parameters and Contract Functions

PSM Parameters

The following parameters in the PSM are controllable by the EC:

  1. GiveMintedFee - fee on trades where user wishes to trade IST for stablecoin held by the PSM. For example: 0.03%
  2. WantMintedFee - fee on trades where user wishes to trade anchor (external stablecoin) in exchange for newly minted IST
  3. MintLimit - refers to the max amount of IST, net of burns, that can be minted by this contract

Contact Offer Pausing

As a possible disaster response, PSM contracts are built with the ability to pause specific offer functions while leaving other functions running normally. Pausing contract offer functions should only be undertaken in response to extreme events and not be part of normal operations.

The PSM is a simple contract and contains only two functions:

  1. wantMinted - user buys newly minted IST with an anchor stablecoin
  2. Pausing this function means that the contract will stop accepting the anchor stablecoin in exchange for new IST
  3. giveMinted - user buys an anchor stablecoin using IST
  4. Pausing this function means that the contract will stop accepting IST in exchange for anchor stablecoins held by the PSM
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For those who wonder where you can find the open source code for the Inter Protocol contracts, check out the agoric-sdk monorepo. For example, PSM functions and parameters mentioned above is declared at agoric-sdk/psm.js at 59139b472272527c8915cea4955d49e76496d6a5 · Agoric/agoric-sdk · GitHub

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Hi, folks! My name is Zooko. I’m on the Board of Directors of the Agoric company. I just joined this forum to say how excited I am about this development. :grin:

There seems to be a lot of demand and excitement in the Cosmoverse for Inter Stable Token. This feels like the right time to launch!

And, as a technologist, I am even more excited about the platform underneath IST. Hardened JavaScript and Zoe, and the other parts of the Agoric stack, are powerful, general-purpose technologies that the modern world — starting with blockchain/smart-contract/cryptocurrency — needs.

Something that I’m really proud of is how, after we saw The DAO Hack happen, the Electric Coin Co (makers of Zcash) and I supported the creation of Agoric. It’s great to see it reaching this milestone.

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Note that the launch proposal is also a proposal to fix the accounts to be used by the econ committee:

Zoe invitations to participate in governance contracts are sent to each of those addresses at bootstrap.

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