Upgradability and Governance

Orbis will essentially consist of an L1 smart contract and an associated contract state UTxO; a network of prover nodes; a rollup data structure; the prover node software; and the associated SDKs. Each component may need to be updated to perform an upgrade.

A smart contract cannot be updated after it is deployed on Cardano. The only way to upgrade a smart contract is by deploying a new script.

To enable a transparent upgrade process for the layer 1 rollup smart contract, the L1 rollup contract must contain a governance protocol.

The initial release of Orbis will feature a governance protocol that is based on voting, which is not fully decentralized. The governing body or the “board” of Orbis V1 will be a group of individuals identified by their public keys. Orbis Labs will determine the initial composition of the board.

In the centralized versions of Orbis, the prover could potentially manipulate elections not by creating fake votes but by excluding real votes. This is a special case in the centralized versions of Orbis in which the prover could censor transactions. This loophole will be solved in the first decentralized version of Orbis.

The first fully decentralized version of Orbis will feature a decentralized governance protocol. Meaning, that it allows for the participation of an unlimited number of actors in the system. The design of the decentralized governance protocol will be announced in a future revision of the whitepaper.