Let's enable staking on the new Acuity Polkadot blockchain

The Acuity blockchain uses standard Polkadot consensus and governance.

Just like Polkadot and Kusama, Acuity launched in proof-of-authority mode. We now need to switch to proof-of-stake. Polkadot and Kusama both launched with the Sudo pallet (god-mode) enabled and used this to call staking.forceNewEra to initiate this transition.

However, as Acuity does not have the Sudo pallet enabled, it is necessary to make the staking.forceNewEra call via the proper governance mechanism. To this end I have created an Acuity Council motion. This needs to be voted on by council members so that it can go to a general referendum. Please join the council and vote for this motion.

There is currently another referendum in progress. Under normal circumstances only one referendum can be running at a time and each referendum takes 1 week. This means that the referendum to start staking cannot finish until 9th October. Then there is an enactment delay of 8 days. So staking will probably begin on 17th October. This will give us time for many validators to get ready.

Once PoS has begun, any ACU that the current PoA accounts have accrued will be donated to the treasury.

If you need any assistance with this process, please drop into the Staking channel on Discord.

This is what I am currently considering including in the subsequent council proposal:

• Enable fast-track legislation: Polkadot governance has a fast-track mechanism that allows a proposal to be brought to referendum immediately, with a far shorter voting period than normal (3 days) and a near zero enactment period. This would enable me to propose system upgrades that could be enacted much more quickly.
• Vest the project revenue: on MIX the project revenue was gradually released at a ever-decreasing rate, ending October 18th 2022. The unreleased revenue was brought across to the new ACU blockchain, but it needs to be vested to match the original schedule.
• Enable ACU pallet: expose ACU to DeFi on Ethereum.