The Tari Community Charter (DRAFT)

Governance
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Introduction

Tari was built in the open from its first commit. Its code has always belonged to the public. This charter establishes how that community governs itself.

The words inscribed in Tari’s Genesis block are a declaration of intent. They are reproduced here in full because they are the foundation on which this Council stands. Everything that follows serves the vision they describe.

Manifesto

The following words are inscribed in Tari’s Genesis block, mined on May 6, 2025.

the journey began 2,863 days ago on a sunny day in Oakland

through long troughs of sorrow and hard-won triumphs

we arrive at the beginning

the Tari genesis block

the genesis block is heavy

it’s full of love, beauty, promise, and ambition

of countless fraught decisions and long nights

of a desire to build something that lasts for generations

of a dream to build a better system than all those that came before

Tari is a multi-layered system

the base layer is the foundation for a new network state

one that is pro-human and pro-freedom

its strength comes from the people who choose to do the work

of securing the network

they are the trailblazers. the revolutionaries

for mining Tari is an act of rebellion

a rebellion against a world that increasingly steals our humanity

as we sit in the comfort of our homes, doom scrolling away our time

in an intimate embrace with our favorite device

being milked of our deepest desires and thoughts

and manipulated by saccharine interfaces and slippery algorithms

the devices we love unconditionally are watching us

every click. every stroke watched by cunning eyes

we’ve accepted this fate in the name of convenience

this journey towards oblivion

it’s tragic, and yet, there is something even more insidious at play:

the endless, irrevocable surveillance of our financial affairs

a panopticon where every transaction is a scarlet letter

it wasn’t supposed to be this way

this new financial system isn’t supposed to take away our agency or safety

our transaction history shouldn’t be a cudgel beating us into obedience

our wallets aren’t a window into our souls

enough

in this block. in this moment. we choose another way

Tari is a sanctuary

for the enlightened who need refuge from the piercing gaze

of endless secret eyes

for the visionaries who learn of its magical powers and use

it to bend the will of the world in their direction

and for those who benefit from it unknowingly because, for

them, it’s a cog in a greater machine

welcome

Tari is a boundless paradise

where we all receive a sacred gift: a mythical cloak of invisibility

wrapped in our cloaks as if they were a second skin

we are finally free like all humans that existed before us

to live our lives in joyous anonymity

to protect ourselves and our families from the eyes of infinite jackals

stalking our every move, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce

to live our imperfect lives without every moment becoming an immutable snapshot

to be human

from this moment until the last node is silenced

Tari is ever-changing

we define its culture

we define its traditions

we have the power to shape it, to fix it, to contribute

to etch our code in stone

to become immortal

one day, we pray that Tari will earn everyone’s trust

and become a part of everyone’s daily lives

when that day comes to pass, it will be because of us

Article I. Purpose

The Tari Council is established to uphold the vision, ideals, and objectives declared in the Tari Manifesto, to steward the protocol’s tokenomics as published at Tari / Tokenomics , to direct the protocol’s resources toward the common benefit, and to ensure that governance rests with those who build it.

The protocol belongs to its contributors. This Council exists to honor that principle and to see it realized.

Tari Labs, the protocol’s instigator, participates in the Council as a member, not as its authority. Its voice carries the weight of its contributions, nothing more. Over time, an increasing share of operational control shall pass to the Council, until the protocol belongs fully to those who choose to do the work.

Article II. Composition

The Council shall consist of five to seven members, drawn from the community and from enterprise, serving terms of twelve months. Initial terms shall be staggered so that no more than half of the Council’s seats expire in the same period. No term shall be presumed to renew. At the conclusion of each term, the community may nominate the member to continue, or the seat shall pass to another.

Council members shall receive a monthly stipend of XTM for their service (amount TBD).

Article III. Authority and Responsibility

The Council shall govern the community token allocation.

The Council shall:

  1. Direct what gets funded and what gets built.

  2. Assess community consensus and produce decisions. Where consensus is clear, the Council shall act on it. Where consensus is ambiguous, the Council shall decide and explain its reasoning publicly.

  3. Ensure the protocol has funded contributors, operational infrastructure, a functioning governance process, and a clear public voice.

  4. Appoint and oversee workgroup leads responsible for protocol development, infrastructure, community, and ecosystem growth.

  5. Set and enforce spending thresholds, ensuring no disbursement exceeds the limits prescribed by this charter without the required level of community review.

Article IV. Character of a Council Member

A Council member shall hold the protocol in the highest regard. They shall act in its interest above their own, above any organization’s, and above the Council’s.

A Council member shall be willing to yield their seat to anyone who can advance the protocol further than they can. This is not an aspiration. It is a condition of service.

A Council member shall demonstrate, through sustained conduct, the qualities the protocol demands: consistency of commitment, constructive in disagreement, generosity toward newcomers, and excellence in the work they produce.

Article V. Decisions

Routine matters shall proceed by lazy consensus. A proposal made publicly and meeting no objection within five days shall be adopted.

Substantive matters shall be discussed in public channels and community calls. The Council shall assess rough consensus. The standard is not unanimity. The standard is whether those who object can articulate why.

Strategic matters, including significant spending, protocol changes, and amendments to this charter, shall require fourteen days of open discussion, a seven-day Final Comment Period, and majority Council approval.

Article VI. Nomination and Selection

Any person who has made sustained, verifiable contributions to the Tari protocol may be nominated to the Council. Contributions include, but are not limited to: code, infrastructure, documentation, governance facilitation, community building, and ecosystem development. A single or token contribution shall not suffice.

Nominations shall be made publicly, with evidence of the candidate’s contributions and a clear account of why they would strengthen the Council. The community shall discuss each nomination openly. The Council shall confirm or decline based on the consensus it observes.

The Council shall reflect the breadth of the protocol’s needs: development, infrastructure, community, and enterprise. No single interest shall dominate.

The inaugural Council shall be appointed by Tari Labs from nominations received from the community. Thereafter, nominations and selections shall follow the process described in this Charter.

Article VII. The Obligation to Improve

The Council’s highest obligation is to the protocol, not to itself.

Every member shall accept that the Council must be continuously strengthened. If the protocol would be better served by different people at the table, the Council is bound to make that change. Permanence is not a virtue. Progress is.

This obligation shall be the measure against which every future Council is judged.

Article VIII. Amendments

This charter may be amended through the same process required for strategic decisions: open discussion, a Final Comment Period, and Council approval.

When this charter no longer serves the protocol, the community shall have both the power and the duty to change it.

This charter is published in draft for community review. It is not handed down. It is offered up.

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Thanks for this writeup, @possum !

One thing that seems off about the Nomination and Selection for the council is that while the inaugural council are appointed by Tari Labs, and that makes sense, the text as currently written implies that the council will select the council. That seems like it could result in a council that keeps re-electing itself. I think there should be some check on the council here.

I would submit that the Core Contributors should be the electors from that point forward, since they’re the ones that will be most directly affected by the council’s decision-making.

Speaking of which I believe the most critical task for the initial council will be making the Core Contributor program such that new people can join.

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Thank you excellent points.

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Just read the draft charter.

On the Council Structure:
The anti-permanence clause (Article VII) is crucial. Prevents governance capture while ensuring the Council evolves with protocol needs… great addition!

On Contribution Requirements:
Glad to see “community building” and “ecosystem development” explicitly valued alongside code. Protocol success requires more than just developers.

Question:
How do we measure “sustained contribution”? Timeframe? Volume? Just want to understand what qualifies.

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As a Yat holder and community member since early 2022, I’d like to volunteer as a Councilor. I have moderated Tari Discord for around 2 years and I have followed through with every single announcement.

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On sustained contribution: this is deliberately left a little open in the draft and it’s exactly the kind of thing we want community input on. What would feel right and fair to you?

One idea I’ve been thinking about: it would be easier and more practical to stack rank sustained contribution (code, infrastructure, documentation, governance facilitation, community building, ecosystem development) and sustained conduct (consistency of commitment, constructive in disagreement, generosity toward newcomers, excellence in the work they produce) and see who rises to the top, rather than define criteria ahead of time to score them.

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Years of faithful Discord moderation is real contribution. Right now the charter is in its comment period, so what’s most valuable this week is your feedback on the draft itself.

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Stack ranking makes sense - rigid criteria upfront would be messy.

One challenge: volume vs impact. 100 mediocre posts might rank higher than one critical partnership.

Suggestion: Set a minimum threshold (3+ months visible contribution), then stack rank within that pool on breadth, impact, and conduct.

Conduct should probably be a veto, not a ranking factor. Toxic behaviour disqualifies regardless of contributions.

Who does the ranking? Community consensus or Council + community?

Maybe we should just leave it to nominations and let community discussion surface the strongest candidates naturally.

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I agree with Fox’s point on needing to check incumbents potentially clinging to power, and I think having Core Contributors involved in the election process is a good solution.

I would like to propose that they not be the sole electors, however, as I am worried about the potential for corporate capture down the line. We’ve seen a lot of concerns about Blockstream’s influence over Bitcoin Core over the years, and Bitmain nearly successfully killed SegWit in order to preserve their ASICboost advantage.

Instead, perhaps the electors could be comprised of both the Core Contributors and the council. I’m not sure what if any balance would be appropriate here. Long term I’d expect (hope?) that Core Contributors significantly outnumber the council.

Article IV touches on conduct and yielding seats to more qualified individuals - I would also like to suggest including some impeachment/removal clause in the event of, for example, evidence of illegal/unethical activity and prolonged unexplained absences.

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RFCs and TIPs -- Introduction and Consolidation
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The revised community charter is now on github for final review: rfcs/src/TIP-0002_tari_community_charter.md at main · tari-project/rfcs · GitHub

We will ratify on Monday pending no other major comments.

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I think monthly payment for a council member is slightly risky.

I personally think each council member should receive their XTM compensation only when they step down and the amount should be dynamic dependent on their activities/achievements and involvement.

Risk of it becoming like politics. Big words and promises pre election, but once in seat, interests of Bob are forgotten ;<

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Touching on what @Fox said in the space this week about the prestige of open source positions and minimum contributions - I would like to see some weekly time commitments. Like 15-20hrs/wk of work should be expected at a minimum, in my opinion. If someone doesn’t have the appropriate availability, then their seat would probably be better filled by someone else.

Too many projects I’ve been involved in put community members in essential positions with the expectation that they will be stewards of progress, and then they actually end up stifling progress by neglecting their commitments and holding up processes they are essential to.

I think the stipend should probably be increased. $75/month will not even buy groceries for a single person. It’s less than a single bounty for what should be far more working hours. If the stipend is too low, then only community members who are already wealthy/well off will be able to participate in the council.
I also think an upper limit should be placed on the stipend in USD to prevent it from becoming too exorbitant.

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Hi all,

thanks for having this open for discussion.

The charter sounds nice and well meaning, but it is also pretty aspirational and relies heavily on unenforceable norms. I bet there are already as many different opinions about what this charter means as there are people who read it.

Let me point out a couple of points that stick out the most to me:

  1. 100k XTM per month are totally fine now. But once an XTM costs a dollar and this job pays over a million per year, you’ll get many of the wrong kind of people interested in this job.
  2. “Yielding one’s seat” and character standards sound really good, but the first is unlikely to ever happen and the second is incredibly hard to define and verify. Especially once there will be serious money involved (see 1.). Fox and kinkajou already raised similar concerns. kinkajou’s suggested impeachment/removal clause is a great start, but it is still lacking since it is fully in the council’s hands.
  3. There are subjective criteria everywhere. “Sustained, verifiable contributions”, “qualities the protocol demands”, “misconduct” — all Council-interpreted. Even “rough consensus” is problematic: it works well for highly dynamic, open-source code contributions where anyone can propose something and non-objections let it move forward. But for a formal paid Council making binding decisions on funds and protocol direction it adds vagueness and opens the door to exactly the kind of political dynamics we want to avoid.
  4. All changes to this charter, which governs the council, will have to be approved by the council. So ultimately the governors govern themselves — and they can block any changes that would reduce their own power.

Suggestions on how to fix/improve these issues:

  1. Add a transparent formula or community-ratified process for any future stipend adjustments. — And the longer I think about it, the more I think that this shouldn’t be paid at all. For a position like this, we want people who believe in the protocol, not a paycheck. (Though I just saw kinkajou’s last post and he’s got a valid point, too. I guess it depends on which way you look at it, this is a trade-off well worth discussing.)
  2. Formalise the impeachment process with objective triggers and a short external review step (e.g. past core contributors).
  3. To address the subjectivity problem directly:
    • The Council should publish and maintain a clear Contribution Rubric (as a living document) that defines measurable categories and example thresholds for “sustained, verifiable contributions” (e.g. minimum active months, merged PRs, grants delivered, testnet participation, security reviews, etc.).
    • Require detailed public written justification for every nomination, approval, rejection or removal decision.
    • Replace or clearly define “rough consensus” for Council decisions with explicit voting thresholds (e.g. simple majority for routine matters, 2/3 for strategic ones).
    • Add a simple appeal mechanism for rejected nominees or removed members (review by a temporary panel of past core contributors).
  4. Require that any charter amendments — especially those affecting council powers, selection process or compensation — must be ratified by a binding 2/3 supermajority poll of verified core contributors, independent of the Council vote. This prevents the governors from protecting themselves.

Getting this right is a really hard problem. I don’t claim to have noticed or mentioned every possible problem. And my suggestions are certainly not fixing everything I noticed. But I tried to provide food for thought as well as realistic options for improvement.

Tari’s vision of a decentralized, private system providing humans with individual agency is too important to let governance become the weak link once the incentives get serious. The technological side took over eight years to get right. It would be reckless to now rush the political side within a week.

Thanks again for the open process.

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Welcome to this forum and thank you for such thoughtful feedback.

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I just want to note that dedicating that amount of time is also something only the wealthy/well off can be expected to do. That’s a half-time job, so your remaining half-time would need to be enough to cover all of your expenses since the stipend won’t.

I also don’t think we should be dishing out Tari in an amount that would be enough for someone to live off of right now, since the market cap is so low. I think we’re going to have to live with the fact that people serving on the council will need to be people who have some minimum amount of resources. Assuming we want to make an explicit hours floor, I think that base of people could be expanded by making it closer to 10h/week, with the understanding that there will be weeks that require higher amounts of hours.

Note that a mandate of a specific number of hours may not actually be useful-- who would be doing the time tracking verification to keep the council members accountable? I think it’s more reasonable to have expectations that Tari Council members consistently attend meetings, consistently put in their votes, etc. Those are things which are easily measured from the outside and we expect council members to be doing anyway, so if someone is slacking on those fronts, it’s easy to find.

That seems reasonable to me. It could still be raised/pegged by some process if it really needed to be (inflation could get bad) but even something like ‘$10,000/month as a cap’ would be more than enough for someone to be doing this full time and live comfortably-- that’d be $120,000/year gross, and gives a price aspiration that board members can target if they deem that important without being such ludicrous compensation that it becomes overly distortionary. It’s still within the range of compensation for a software engineer.

I’d do it for free, though. This figure’s more for thinking about should we decide to compensate. Either way, for this first set of council members, the Tari they’re receiving likely won’t have life-changing value during their term, and they’ll need to have outside resources. That is what it is.

@Alex Thank you for the thoughtful notes you’re giving here. I like a lot of your suggestions, especially with making the wider set of core contributors able to do no-confidence/impeachment votes, and their consent being required to change the charter.

I personally think that the CCs should have some independent powers from the council more generally so they can have a bit of a check, but since the council has yet to form and would be tasked with setting up the program, it’s hard to say how that would work just yet. We might write in the existence of the CCs into the charter, specify some minimum amount of power they have, and then task the Council with defining the program setup, within those bounds.

Note, though-- there’s only so much a written charter can do. No set of laws can prevent impropriety-- processes can slow it down, but the real checks are things like visibility, increasing the breadth of decision makers and reducing the amount of things that need to be centrally decided to begin with.

We can definitely do better here, though.

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I think Tari Labs should control the premine

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Yes, that’s how I settled on 15-20hrs. I think it should be a part time job, and compensated as such. I’ve seen projects suffer because the people in charge/getting paid neglect their responsibilities and end up holding up the work of unpaid volunteers, which is understandably very frustrating to those volunteer contributors. I want to avoid that happening here with Tari.

This makes sense for the first council or two, but I also want council members to be people that are really passionate about Tari and go above and beyond. People work full time jobs and have startups in their free time. 15-20hrs/wk commitment on a startup is negligible, you could do that just in a weekend, and that’s basically what Tari is right now - a startup.
We’re shifting away from a full-time and well funded development company to a part-time community council. We shouldn’t expect to be a billion dollar network if people are treating the council like a hobby. If people don’t have that drive, they can continue volunteering like we’re all doing now. Eventually I’d even like to see the council and core contributors become full-time positions.

I think you raise a great point here. And some people get more done in 15hrs than others. So I would be fine if the floor were lower but we had concrete expectations for attendance, voting, etc to be enforced by more specific language in the charter.

An important benefit of having a 7 person council is that everyone can bring a unique perspective to the table. I don’t want to see most proposals getting adopted by lazy consensus, for example, because members of the council are not actively participating. They’ll all have something valuable to contribute!

@Alex raises some great points that the criteria as written are a bit vague/subjective, and I think fleshing out contribution expectations a bit more would remedy some of these concerns.

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I think we should ultimately make the Charter itself a smart contract — a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) running on Tari Ootle.

It doesn’t have to all go on-chain right away, but that should be the ultimate goal. We need to eat our own dogfood if we want other people to believe in what we are building here.

This idea first came to me when thinking about the stipend. There are good arguments for paying councillors so they can treat the role seriously (15–20 hrs/week as kinkajou suggested). But it definitely shouldn’t become so high that it corrupts people. Dynamically adjusting the stipend according to something like the average global cost of living would solve several concerns at once:

  • It gives a lower bound that addresses kinkajou’s worry about capable people not being able to afford the time.
  • It addresses Fox’s inflation concerns.
  • It addresses my worry about people with lots of spare time simply jumping in to siphon off millions once XTM appreciates.

There should also be an upper bound dependent on the XTM price. For example: pay out 100 k XTM each month until that amount reaches the average global living costs; after that, adjust the payout dynamically to stay aligned with living costs instead of letting it scale with token price.

All of this could be put into a smart contract on Ootle. The hardest part would probably be defining the exact metrics and oracles, but the actual monthly stipend formula would be trivial to code and would completely automate the payout process.

I’d suggest just going easy, step by step. Formulate everything in natural language in the Community Charter first, but make it an ongoing project to implement it on Ootle over time. Start with easy things as the stipend calculation and payout. Then later take care of voting, for example.

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Hi community! Tari Labs is still working through the thoughtful feedback, thank you. We hope to finalize the charter tomorrow after the X Space!

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V4 RC Charter: docs: charter v4 community feedback updates by metalaureate · Pull Request #168 · tari-project/rfcs · GitHub

@Fox @Alex @kinkajou @rhoam @AppleWithWorms @Okz @PotR

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