serai/docs/protocol_changes/index.md

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Protocol Changes	default	5

Protocol Changes

The protocol has no central authority nor organization nor actors (such as liquidity providers/validators) who can compel new protocol rules. The Serai protocol is as-written with all granted functionality and declared rules present.

Validators are explicitly granted the ability to signal for two things to occur:

1) Halt another validator set.

This will presumably occur if another validator set turns malicious and is the expected incident response in order to apply an economic penalty of ideally greater value than damage wrecked. Halting a validator set prevents further publication of Batchs, preventing improper actions on the Serai blockchain, and preventing validators from unstaking (as unstaking only occurs once future validator sets have accepted responsibility, and accepting responsibility requires Batch publication). This effectively burns the malicious validators' stake.

2) Retire the protocol.

A supermajority of validators may favor a signal (an opaque 32-byte ID). A common signal gaining sufficient favor will cause the protocol to stop producing blocks in two weeks.

Nodes will presumably, as individual entities, hard fork to new consensus rules. These rules presumably will remove the rule to stop producing blocks in two weeks, they may declare new validators, and they may declare new functionality entirely.

While nodes individually hard fork, across every hard fork the state of the various sriXYZ coins (such as sriBTC, sriETH, sriDAI, and sriXMR) remains intact (unless the new rules modify such state). These coins can still be burned with instructions (unless the new rules prevent that) and if a validator set doesn't send XYZ as expected, they can be halted (effectively burning their SRI stake). Accordingly, every node decides if and how to future participate, with the abilities and powers they declare themselves to have.