Building block · Groups
Governance
Consensus, consent, majority, open or one steward, with a higher bar for changing the rules.
What a person notices
A group picks how it wants to decide things, in plain terms: everyone has to agree, nobody objects, most people agree, anyone can decide, or one steward decides. It's a real choice, made once and then lived with.
A person proposing something in a group sees the actual threshold it needs to pass, and whether it passed is enforced by the group itself, not left to whichever app someone happens to be using.
Changing the group's own rules, rather than making an everyday decision, needs a noticeably higher bar to pass. That's on purpose: it's harder to rewrite the group's foundations than to approve ordinary business.
The bar a proposal has to clear is based on who is actually a member right now, so it doesn't quietly get easier or harder to pass just because people joined or left long ago.
What you get as a developer
A Hive picks one of five real governance modes: consensus, consent, majority, open, or one steward. Once picked, the required threshold is enforced by the group's own chain, so a client app can't just ignore it or fake a pass.
Five modes, not a free-text setting
Consensus (everyone agrees), consent (nobody objects), majority, open (anyone decides), or one steward. The mode is a real, enforced choice, not a label on top of ad hoc logic.
Thresholds are enforced on-chain
Whether a proposal passed is checked against the group's chain and its current membership, not computed once in application code and trusted from then on.
A higher bar for the rules themselves
Changing the group's own governance rules requires a two-thirds supermajority, distinctly higher than the bar for an everyday decision under the same mode.
Thresholds track live membership
Both the everyday threshold and the two-thirds rules-change bar are computed against who is currently a member, not a headcount fixed back when the group was founded.
This means a Hive's decisions are provable after the fact: anyone can check that a given proposal actually cleared the threshold the group chose, using the group's own chain rather than trusting a report from any one client.
How it connects
Hives
Governance is the decision-making layer that operates on top of a Hive's membership and proposals.
Group tokens
Minting a Hive-issued token can be routed through this same governance vote, rather than any one person minting at will.
Treasury & payouts
Spending from a Hive's shared treasury can also be gated by governance, on top of the co-signing requirement.