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Solana Proposal Process

What is a Proposal?​

A proposal is a design document describing a new feature for Solana or its processes or environment. The proposal should document the rationale for the feature and enough documentation to understand the implementation.

Rationale​

A proposal is intended to be reviewed by core engineering and community members keeping in mind security concerns, tradeoffs, and backwards compatibility. Having a proposal process helps identify design issues early, alert the community on a change, helps scale newer contributors on the architecture, and acts as a historical record of the design decisions that have gone into Solana. For implementors, the proposal is a blueprint for the feature and helps track the development of a feature.

When you need to follow this process​

You need to follow this process if you intend to make "substantial" changes to the Validator, RPC, consensus, or a change to the proposal process itself. What constitutes a "substantial" change is evolving based on community norms and varies depending on what part of the ecosystem you are proposing to change, but may include the following:

  • A change in format of a RPC API method
  • Networking interface changes between validators
  • Compute requirement changes on the runtime

Some changes do not require a proposal:

  • Rephrasing, reorganizing, refactoring, or otherwise "changing shape does not change meaning".
  • Additions that strictly improve objective, numerical quality criteria (warning removal, speedup, better platform coverage, more parallelism, trap more errors, etc.)

Proposal Types​

There are two types of proposals:

  • A Standard Proposal describes any change that affects most or all Solana implementations, such as a change to the network protocol, consensus, proposed application standards/conventions, block or transaction validity, or any change or addition that affects the interoperability of applications using Solana. Standard proposals can be broken down into the following categories:

    • Core: Anything that affects consensus or substantial changes to the validator.
    • Networking: Changes or substantial improvements to network protocol specifications.
    • Interfaces: Breaking changes around the client JSON RPC API specifications and standards.

  • A Meta Proposal describes a process surrounding Solana or proposes a change to (or an event in) a process. Process Proposals are like Standard Proposals but apply to areas other than the Solana protocol itself. They may propose an implementation, but not to Solana's codebase; they often require community consensus and users are typically not free to ignore them. Examples include procedures, guidelines, changes to the decision-making process, and changes to the tools or environment used in Solana development. Any meta-SIMD is also considered a Process Proposals.

Proposal Lifecycle​

The stages in a lifecycle of a proposal are as follows:

  • Idea
  • Draft
  • Review
  • Accepted
  • Living
  • Stagnant
  • Withdrawn
  • Implemented
  • Activated
flowchart LR
  Idea
  Draft
  Review
  Accepted

  subgraph fail[&nbsp];
    Stagnant
    Withdrawn
  end

  style fail fill:#ffe8e7,stroke:none
  style Accepted fill:#f3f8dc,stroke:#c3db50;

  Idea ---> Draft;
  Draft ---> Review;
  Review ---> Accepted;
  Accepted ---> Implemented;
  Implemented ---> Activated;
  Review ---> Living;
  Accepted ---> Withdrawn;

  Draft ---> Stagnant;
  Review ---> Stagnant;
  Review ---> Withdrawn;

Idea​

At the idea stage, parties involved in the proposal are you -- the champion or proposal author -- the reviewers, and the Solana Core Contributors.

Before you begin writing a formal proposal, you should vet your idea. Ask the Solana core community first if an idea is original to avoid wasting time on something that will be rejected based on prior research. Be sure to post your ideas to the SIMD ideas discussion page and gather feedback before making your formal Proposal

Draft​

To begin drafting the proposal, do the following:

  • Fork the proposal repository
  • Copy XXXX-template.md to proposals/XXXX-my-feature.md (where "my-feature" is descriptive)
  • Fill in the proposal. Put care into the details: proposals that do not present convincing motivation, demonstrate lack of understanding of the design's impact, or are disingenuous about the drawbacks or alternatives tend to be poorly received. Low quality proposals with limited engagement will be closed by SIMD repository maintainers.
  • Submit a pull request.
  • Now that your proposal has an open pull request, use the issue number of the PR to update the XXXX- prefix to the number.

Review​

During review, the owner of the proposal is in charge of gathering and integrating feedback. The most relevant core contributors to the proposal should be included in the review process. Review will take place completely through Github so that all comments are collected and documented. Once consensus is met by the core contributors, the proposal can either be accepted or withdrawn. This step is typically taken when enough tradeoffs have been considered for the core contributors to make a decision. It is not necessary for all participants to reach consensus. However, there should not be a strong consensus against the proposal outside of the core contributors.

Accepted​

Some accepted proposals represent vital features that can be implemented right away. Other accepted proposals can wait until some arbitrary core contributor feels like doing the work. Every accepted proposal should have an associated tracking issue in the Solana repository. If the implementation requires the feature to be activated using the feature activation program, a feature-gate issue for tracking across clusters should also be created. While it is not necessary for the proposal author to also write the implementation, it is by far the most effective way to see a proposal through to completion: authors should not expect that other project developers will take on responsibility for implementing their accepted feature.

Implemented​

When all relevant teams have completed development of the SIMD's feature, the SIMD is "Implemented".

Activated​

A proposal will have the status Activated once it has been implemented, tested, and finally activated on mainnet beta.

Living​

A special status for SIMDs that are designed to be continually updated and not reach a state of finality. This includes most notably SIMD-1. This status must undergo extra scrutiny and review when updating the status from review to living.

Stagnant​

If a proposal reaches 6 months without activity, the proposal will be marked as stale to be closed. A new proposal can be opened if the proposal is closed and has a chance of reaching consensus.

Withdrawn​

The author has withdrawn the proposal. This state has finality and can no longer be resurrected. If the idea is pursued at a later date it is considered a new proposal.