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.