New Robonomics Crowdloan Campaign, December 2022 / Robonomics Network

After a bit of a hitch caused by the chaos in the early days of OpenGov, we're ready to restart the Robonomics crowdloan campaign. In this article, we'll take a look at the series of events that led to the restart of the campaign and present its new parameters.

Kusama OpenGov Causes cₕₐₒₛ

The long awaited arrival of the new governance system, OpenGov (Gov2), has finally arrived on Kusama, but it brought along a lot of chaos with it. The instatement of the new OpenGov system resulted in the previously scheduled auctions not being successfully enacted. The Kusama community had started Gov1 referendum #252 for fixing the auctions schedule, but it did not enact successfully because of restrictions of AuctionAdmin privilege. This error was caused by the fact that in the new gov system it is mandatory to push the OpenGov proposal on the Auction track in order to launch auctions. It was decided to adjust OpenGov params with a runtime upgrade, but this referendum was also not successful either due to a conflict between the Gov1 and Gov2 logic.

All in all, it took the Kusama community and developers a couple of weeks to figure out the intricacies of the new governance system. This was unforeseen, and had impacted the Robonomics project’s plans to bid in an parachain slot auction in our November 2022 crowdloan campaign. We have already dissolved the November 2022 crowdloan which was initiated on paraID 2237, and all KSM has been returned to the crowdloan contributors.

New Challenges for Extending the Lease of the Slot

The standard method for swapping parachain leases prior to the release of OpenGov was the following:

Generate new paraID using registrar(Reserve) extrinsic.
Set on-chain ID for new paraID.
Open crowdloan using crowdloan(Create) extrinsic.
Bid in a parachain slot auction.
If successful in the auction, then the developers would initiate governance action to swap over the lease from this donor paraID to the working parachain paraID using the forceLease and registrar:swap functions, similar to these previous referendums: Karura lease swap, Moonriver and Khala lease swap, Shiden lease swap, Parallel-Heiko lease swap, Genshiro lease swap.
The end result would be that the working parachain would have its lease extended, continue to produce blocks, and not suffer any downtime.

However, with the introduction of OpenGov, thresholds for governance action on Kusama have become extraordinarily high. In basic terms, the new OpenGov system has multiple tracks. Each track can support a specific type of function (can call only particular extrinsics). Some tracks have limited power, such as tipping small amounts of KSM, but others have tremendous power, such as the Root track.

The thresholds for OpenGov tracks are extraordinarily high, and there are already actions within the Kusama community to lower them, as they are already causing issues for parachain projects such as Kintsugi. Simply put, a particular referendum must obtain enough support from the network's stakeholders (KSM holders) in order for the referendum to pass from the voting period to the confirmation period.

In order for the parachain to be able to carry out the aforementioned 6 step plan to swap the lease, it is needed to start the parachain auction schedule once again, this means that an OpenGov referendum should pass that restarts the auctions either via the Lease Admin track, or possibly as part of a runtime upgrade via the Root/Whitelisted Caller tracks. This is where the issue arises – in order for the referendum to be put into the confirmation period in a timely manner, it requires a significant percentage of all circulating supply of KSM tokens to vote in favour of the referendum. Typical voter turnout on Kusama is relatively low, meaning that it could potentially take multiple weeks for a Lease Admin track referendum to reach a threshold where it is realistically possible for the referendum to be pushed through to the confirmation period.

While we still hope that the community will adjust OpenGov params, fortunately, there is a way that the parachain can use XCM in order to execute the 6 step plan without needing to utilise the relay chain’s new OpenGov system.

We can register a new paraID using the registrar(Reserve) extrinsic, and load a shell runtime to that paraID using the registrar(Register) extrinsic. This parachain should only initiate XCM messages for lease swaps. We then send an XCM message containing a lease swap request from the main parachain to the shell parachain. When the shell parachain wins an auction, and the lease becomes active, a minimal environment is launched which is able to send an XCM message to swap the lease slot with the main parachain.

New Parameters for Crowdloan Campaign

As mentioned previously, we want to automate our crowdloan campaigns based on the statistics on the cost of slot leasing and ideal staking rate. Let’s take a look at current parameters for the renewal algorithm.

1. Statistics of median leasing price from August to November 2022 (information taken from parachains.info):

	Auction 62	Auction 61	Auction 60	Auction 59	Auction 58	Auction 57	Auction 56	Auction 55	Auction 54	Auction 53	Auction 52	Auction 51	Auction 50
Winner	Parathread 2236	Parathread 2233	Zeitgeist	Crab Network	—	Crust Shadow	Genshiro	DAO IPCI	Parathread 2223	Quartz	Bit.Country	Snow	Subsocial
Last Bid (KSM)	1 005	241	500	11	0	1 807	2 000	111	1 001	1 005	3 500	13 926	1 001
Contributions	self-funded	self-funded	self-funded	self-funded	—	209	160	self-funded	self-funded	self-funded	self-funded	782	self-funded
Number of participants	1	3	2	1	0	1	2	2	2	2	2	1	1

2. The median bid is:

3. We additionally introduce an correction if previous crowdloan campaigns were not successful. The median bid adjusted for previous crowdloan attempts is:

4. The ideal staking rate is:

5. The real staking rate is:

6. The ideal interest rate is:

7. The reward for participation in the crowdloan campaign (XRT per 1 KSM):

8. Total payouts to crowdloan participants:

That's the story. And, as always, ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ.