Official announcement for Reti Pooling users about Governance Period 15

[Adri]

As we prepare to launch governance period 15 (GP15) on Monday, we wanted to address the fact that the Reti Pooling smart contract does not provide a way to integrate with governance.

We understand that Reti Pooling was built with an emphasis on minimizing risk for the users. For that reason, the underlying smart contract account is not able to create and send the 0 Algo transaction with the notefield, required to manually commit Algo and vote in governance.

The Algorand governance protocol relies on off-chain reading of transaction history and a standard message format, signed by accounts declaring their commitment to gain voting power. Our technical team has thoroughly explored the possibility of integrating Reti Pooling into this process. However, the participation of Application Accounts — accounts controlled by smart contracts — with commitments shared among multiple users, raises complex challenges, particularly with respect to the trust model. To ensure the integrity of the process, it would be necessary to define a general, verifiable, and protocol-independent relationship between the Application Account, its controller, and the staking participants.

At this time, any feasible solution would require structural changes to the Governance protocol and the introduction of new ad hoc messages specific to the Reti Pooling protocol. Unlike the integration of liquid staking token (LST) protocols, which share a common technical standard and do not impose exceptions on the system, supporting the Reti Pooling protocol would require a custom implementation. For this reason, we have decided not to include Reti Pooling in the current voting process. We will, however, be working toward developing a shared, sustainable, and secure solution for future governance periods.

With GP15 kicking off next week, it is not technically feasible to implement a solution that would allow Reti Pooling managers to commit and vote. However, there is another path for participants who wish to continue to secure the network, earn rewards, and vote, but do not meet the 30,000 Algo minimum threshold for solo-staking or P2P staking (i.e., Valar). DeFi has been integrated with governance since 2022, allowing users providing liquidity in their favorite protocols to also participate in governance. Liquid stake tokens, such as cAlgo, mAlgo, tAlgo, xAlgo and dualSTAKE, and consensus-compatible liquidity pools, allow users to secure the network, earn rewards, and participate in governance.**

This year is very transformative for the Algorand ecosystem. With big change comes bumps in the road, but we want to and are committed to working together to build strength and resilience now and into the future.

[Adri]

Please tag @cusma if you have technical questions.

[HMP]

extremely disappointing. putting the limitation blame on Reti, all the while it is a foundation owned product is shooting one self in both legs.

400M staked Algos disapproved, the place where those with smaller bags can participate in a collective manner is kicked out of governance, with all their voting power void and annulled.

Sending them to LSTs misses the point. if they wanted lst, they would’ve done lst from the start.

For all the technical wonder that is Algorand, I don’t believe for a second this couldn’t be solved. Foundation oversaw the development of Reti and should’ve been prepared right from the start.

Yet another “smdh” blunder from xgov and governance team.

[LoafPickle]

I understand that this is for Governance, but will the new xGov portal allow people in reti pools to vote based on the blocks they proposed, proportional to their stake?

[fisherman.algo]

Algorand governance is not a protocol. It’s a single off-chain script that scrapes the indexer, tallies balances, and writes to a database that only the Foundation has access to. That script has been tweaked in the past to include LP tokens, LSTs, etc.

There is no consensus rule, no on-chain logic, and no “protocol constraint” that blocks counting Reti stake. Pretending otherwise misleads the community. You could trivially allow the Reti pool owner to do the zero ALGO transaction on behalf of their pool.

Reti is a true protocol – immutable contracts holding 450M ALGO. Expecting contracts to do zero ALGO transactions to a random account with notes that can arbitrarily change is an unreasonable ask. It makes much more sense to update your script than to implement random calls (that can, and have changed) in immutable contracts.

Reti is among the most fully ‘on-chain’ protocols of its kind - especially on Algorand. All validators, all pools, all stakers, and all balances are ALL instantly readable directly from state from any Algorand node anywhere in the world. The Reti UI has no backend and gets all of its data entirely from the chain. So an ‘on-chain governance’ mechanism can read this data in a number of ways: state read snapshots, watching one of its many ARC28 emitted events (every stake add/remove for eg), or watching any of its ABI method calls (ARC56 spec and clients - all published) directly.

The Foundation has had over six months to add support for Reti. They have been aware of its development since early 2024 (the first commit was made on January 22, 2024). There were private foundation discussions in Barcelona at Decipher (June 2024) as well as a full public presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5TFlphojnQ

Reti’s need for a working test environment for upcoming incentive changes is what spawned the creation of the ‘fnet’ network. It was the reason multiple new opcodes were added to the AVM. Reti was the only protocol being developed for incentives for quite some time.

Instead of spending a few days updating the script, you waited until two weeks before Governance 15 and pinned the blame on Reti… a protocol that the Foundation itself owns! GitHub - algorandfoundation/reti: Contracts, Node Daemon, and UI for Algorand 'The Reti' consensus incentives

You say structural changes would be needed, but you fail to describe what that means. Reti pools all have a unique, unchangeable, owner account. The owner account can trivially send the 0 ALGO txn on behalf of their pool. You say that this raises complex challenges with respect to the trust model but don’t explain what they are.

This is a complete failure of the Governance team. Updating your off-chain script is trivially feasible. Treating 450M ALGO stake as an afterthought and actually suggesting that users UNSTAKE from Reti and stake in other centralized protocols shows how little care is being applied to governance and users.