Armada

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Governance ​

Armada is governed by holders of the ARM token. Governance controls the protocol's changeable parameters, its treasury, and its upgrades — within firm guardrails, and with a core that no vote can touch.

The guiding principle is fail-by-default: a proposal passes only if it earns genuine majority support and meets quorum. Anyone can propose; only proposals the community actively backs take effect.

Who governs ​

  • Holders and delegates cast the votes. Voting power is delegated ARM (see Voting & delegation).
  • The governor and timelock are the on-chain machinery. Passed proposals are queued in a timelock and execute only after a delay, giving the community time to react.
  • The Treasury Steward is an elected role for routine, day-to-day treasury spending, using a faster "pass-by-default" process. See Treasury.
  • The Security Council is a small multisig that acts as an emergency backstop — it can veto a queued proposal. See Security Council.

What governance can and can't do ​

Governance steers the parts of the protocol that are meant to evolve — fee rates, treasury spending, authorized adapters, and the upgradeable contracts — while the trust-critical core is immutable: the cryptography, the shielded pool, the ARM token, and the revenue-lock and wind-down rules cannot be changed by any vote. The full split is in Scope.

Guardrails, not just votes ​

Because governance controls real value, it operates inside structural limits rather than on trust alone:

  • Treasury outflow limits cap how much value can leave the treasury in any rolling window, so even a passed malicious proposal can only extract a bounded amount.
  • The execution delay and Security Council veto provide a window to detect and stop a hostile proposal before it executes.
  • The immutable core means the worst case is bounded leakage over time, not a catastrophic drain or a redefinition of the protocol's guarantees.

The system is designed to degrade predictably rather than fail all at once. The pages that follow cover how proposals work, how votes are counted, what's in and out of scope, and the treasury, Security Council, and upgrade mechanics.