Whitelist of addresses that can create proposals

Governance Process
10

I’m approaching completion with the engineering work for this project and would like to provide an update on the technical details of the implementation. This is the first update to the Governor Bravo implementation and acts as an example of how to update the Governance system.

At a high level, the new features allows for governance or the community multisig to set whitelist status expirations for any account. It was done with this format to introduce a concept of a term to governance. Users are granted special permission for a limited time and need to actively participate and perform to have their special status renewed. This term is set as an expiration timestamp after which their special whitelist status expires.

Due to the whitelist status, whitelisted proposals can’t be canceled for falling below the proposal threshold, so as a safety precaution, the community multisig will be able to cancel these proposals. It is unlikely that this feature will ever be used. The community multisig does not receive unlimited veto powers—it is only able to cancel proposals from users with less votes than the proposal threshold.

Technical Details

You can view the code changes here.

I have opted to create two new stored values:

  1. whitelistAccountExpirations - an array of timestamp expirations for the whitelist status of each account. An account is whitelisted if now < whitelistAccountExpirations[msg.sender].
  2. whitelistGuardian - an address which is in charge of monitoring and setting whitelisted accounts. The whitelistGuardian will initially be the community multisig. The whitelistGuardian is able to add and remove whitelistedAccounts and cancel proposals by whitelisted accounts. The guardian is unable to cancel a proposal by an account which meets the proposal threshold.

There are three new functions:

  1. isWhitelisted(address account) - isWhitelisted returns a boolean value of whether an account is whitelisted. This logic is isolated into its own function for readability.
  2. _setWhitelistAccountExpiration(address account, uint expiration) - setWhitelistAccountExpiration stores a new expiration for a given account’s whitelist status. An expiration of 0 removes the account from the whitelist. This is a permissioned function callable by governance and the whitelistGuardian.
  3. _setWhitelistGuardian(address account) - This function sets the whitelistGuardian. It is a permissioned function only callable by governance.

There is extensive testing done through scenario unit tests here along with a forking simulation here. I do not consider this code frozen yet, but in the coming days I hope to finish and begin a bug bounty.

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