Governance & Voting
æternity's protocol-level governance runs stake-weighted polls through a Registry contract,
with each poll deployed as its own Poll contract and weighted by AE balance and delegation.
Superhero surfaces the whole system at superhero.com/voting (opens in a new tab).
Not the same thing as a community DAO
Two different systems, two different contract sets, two different sources of voting power.
| æternity governance poll | Community DAO | |
|---|---|---|
| Contracts | Registry.aes, Poll.aes | DAO.aes, DAOVote.aes |
| Scope | The æternity ecosystem as a whole | One community token's treasury |
| Voting power | AE balance at the poll's close height, plus delegated AE | That community's AEX-9 token balance |
| Tokens locked while voting | No | Yes: an AEX-9 allowance locks your stake |
| Delegation | Yes, global and transitive | No |
| Ballot | Any list of at least two options | Binary: in favour or against |
| Outcome | Signalling. Nothing executes automatically. | Executes an on-chain action via apply_vote_subject |
| Cost to open | Two transactions, roughly 0.02 AE | 555 AE, non-refundable |
| Duration | Whatever close height the author sets, or never | Fixed at two weeks |
| Where in the app | /voting | /trends/daos |
A governance poll does not lock your tokens and does not execute anything. It records stake-weighted opinion at a block height; acting on that result is an off-chain process. A community DAO vote locks your stake and, if it passes, moves real money on-chain. For community treasuries and payout proposals, see Community DAOs.
How a poll works
- Somebody deploys a
Pollcontract with a title, a description, a reference link and a list of options, then registers it in theRegistry. That is two transactions. - Any account votes by calling
vote(option)on the poll contract. One vote per address; you can change it or revoke it at any time before the poll closes. - Accounts that have not voted have their AE counted for whoever they delegated to.
- At the poll's close height, balances and delegations at that height decide the weight of each option.
- The governance backend computes and publishes the stake-weighted result.
The official result is stake_weighted_results. Raw vote counts are address counts and
are not the outcome; see Polls.
In this section
- Polls: the data model, how stake weighting works, and which result figure is authoritative.
- Creating a Poll: the two-transaction creation flow, from the UI and from the CLI, with every field limit.
- Voting on Polls: casting and revoking a vote.
- Delegation: delegating your AE weight, revoking it, and how chains of delegation resolve.
- The Governance Registry: the contract that indexes every poll and every delegation, with deployed addresses.
The Voting page
Superhero's /voting route is one page with four tabs, driven by the URL:
| Tab | Route | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Polls | /voting | Browse and search polls, filtered by open, closed or all |
| Vote | /voting/p/:pollAddress | One poll: its options, live results, and your vote |
| My Account | /voting/account | Your balance, your delegation, and who delegates to you |
| Create Poll | /voting/create | The poll creation form |
Related
- Community DAOs: per-community treasury governance.
- Polls: how a poll is counted.
- The Governance Registry: contract addresses and the governance API.
- Governance with an agent: driving all of this from the CLI or an AI agent.
- superhero.com/voting (opens in a new tab): the live governance interface.
- æternity governance (opens in a new tab): the protocol's description of delegated coin-weighted governance.