Proposing a change to Aere Network

This document is for someone who is not part of the Aere Foundation and wants to change how Aere Network works. It tells you what to do, what happens next, and who decides. The last of those three is the one most projects are vague about, so it is answered first.

Who decides

The founder decides. Today, ratification of an AIP is one person's decision, exercised through the Aere Foundation account 0x0243A4f47D44b40b65D33f20329dE20D00c6f3C3. That account is a single key. It is not a multisig, it is not a timelock, and there is no on-chain vote that binds it.

There is a governance stack deployed on chain 2800 (a Governor, a Timelock, and a governance token). It controls nothing. No production contract on chain 2800 is owned by a timelock, and the governance contracts hold no authority over the protocol. They exist as deployed, inert infrastructure for a future in which they do. Do not read their existence as a claim that Aere has on-chain governance.

The network runs seven QBFT validators, all operated by the Foundation, on one live client, with no external security audit. The effective Nakamoto coefficient is 1.

This is worth stating plainly rather than implying a governance that does not exist. If you are deciding whether to invest engineering effort in an Aere proposal, that paragraph is the fact you need, and finding it out later would be worse for you and for us.

What this means in practice for you:

A good technical argument can win. There is no stake threshold, no token requirement, no membership, and no fee. Your proposal is judged on whether it is correct and worth doing.
There is no appeal. If the founder declines your proposal, that is the end of it inside this process. Aere's proposals are CC0, so forking the record and implementing your version elsewhere is always available to you, and nobody here will treat that as hostile.
A rejection will be written down. If your AIP is rejected, it keeps its number, moves to Withdrawn, and stays in the repository with the reason recorded. We do not delete proposals we disagreed with.

What we will not do

Two commitments, so you know what you are relying on:

We will not renumber or reuse your number. Once your proposal is assigned AIP-N it is AIP-N permanently, including if it is withdrawn (AIP-1 section 2).
We will not silently edit your proposal after it is accepted. A Final AIP is frozen. Corrections are appended as dated errata that leave the original text visible (AIP-1 section 5).

How to propose

Step 0: check it belongs in an AIP

In scope: a protocol or consensus change (block time, fee routing, precompiles); a new contract standard or interface others integrate against; a token or account standard convention; a process or governance change.

Out of scope: bug-fix redeploys that preserve an existing interface, routine parameter tuning inside an already-ratified bound, and pure documentation. A security vulnerability is not an AIP: do not publish it. Report it privately first.

If you are unsure, propose it anyway. The editor will tell you.

Step 1: write it

Copy aip-template.md. Fill in every section. Do not delete a header; write "None" if a section does not apply, because "Security Considerations: None" is a claim a reviewer can challenge and a missing section is not.

The rules that get proposals bounced fastest:

Cite addresses verbatim from sdk-js/src/addresses.ts. Do not retype them.
Label every number as measured (reproducible from the chain or a repo fixture), spec (a configured or standardized value), or estimate.
Write "to be measured" rather than guessing. A guessed gas figure is worse than an absent one, because the reader cannot tell it is a guess.
Do not claim post-quantum consensus. Aere consensus is classical secp256k1 ECDSA QBFT. Aere's post-quantum work is at the signature, account and application layers. A proposal that blurs this will be sent back.

Step 2: submit it

Open a pull request against aere-research/aips/ adding AIP-N.md, where N is the next free integer, plus a row in README.md. If you cannot open a pull request, send the document by any route that reaches the Foundation; the format matters, the transport does not.

Step 3: what happens next

Stage	What happens	Who	Typical time
Well-formedness check	The editor checks the template is complete, the number is right, and every cited address, hash and number is real. This is not a merit review.	Editor (the Foundation today)	days
Draft	Your number is assigned. You own the document and can keep changing it.	You	as long as you want
Review	You declare it ready for scrutiny. Open questions are tracked inside the document itself, not in a side channel.	You, plus anyone who comments	open-ended
Last Call	A final review window, 14 days by default, with the end date written into the document.	Editor	14 days
Final	Ratified. Frozen under AIP-1 section 5.	Founder	one decision

You can stop at any point by withdrawing. The editor moves a proposal to Stagnant after six months of inactivity in Draft or Review; anyone, including you later, can revive it.

Step 4: honestly, about "review"

Aere has no external technical community commenting on AIPs yet. This is not a modesty statement, it is the current state: decentralization is thin and external usage is thin. If you file a proposal today, the review you get is from the Foundation, and it may be the only review you get.

We record that rather than inventing the alternative. There are no fabricated comment threads in this repository, no invented "the community debated", and no imagined participants. When real external comment arrives it will be recorded as it happened. Until then, do not expect a crowd, and do not mistake an empty comment section for consensus.

Reporting a vulnerability instead

If you found a security bug, this is the wrong document. Do not file an AIP, do not open a public pull request, and do not include the vulnerability in any public issue. Report it privately to the Foundation first. Publishing a live vulnerability against a chain with a single operator and no external audit endangers users who have no way to react.

Copyright

Everything you submit here is CC0, released to the public domain. If that is not acceptable to you, do not submit it.

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