Robonomics proposes retiring its Sudo key in favour of a two-track OpenGov
Victoria Shinder2 min readRobonomics, a Polkadot parachain for IoT and cyber-physical systems, has put a governance proposal to the Polkadot Forum, posted on 22 September 2026 by a team member writing as ensrationis. Runtime 50 is live on Polkadot, and version 5.1 would replace Sudo — currently held by a developer multisig — with standard OpenGov.
The stated components are stock Polkadot SDK pallets, benchmarked: pallet-referenda, pallet-conviction-voting, pallet-whitelist, pallet-preimage and pallet-scheduler. What is deliberately left out is the surrounding structure — no Council, no Fellowship, no treasury tracks.
There are two tracks only. Root: up to 14 days deciding, approval sliding from 90% to 51%, support from 50% to 15%, one referendum deciding at a time. Whitelisted Caller: up to 3 days, approval 99% to 80%, support 2% to 1%, ten deciding at once. Anyone may open a Root referendum, and XRT holders vote with conviction, from 1x for 7 days to 6x for 224 days.
The fast track is constrained in a specific way. A core-team collective of up to seven members, with half agreeing, can whitelist the hash of one exact call — which by itself executes nothing. That call still requires a public referendum with at least 1% of all XRT voting aye.
The handover is two-step: the pallets ship while the multisig keeps Sudo as a safety net, and the first real referendum is a runtime upgrade that removes Sudo. The post asks other parachain teams whether anyone has removed Sudo by referendum, what they wish they had kept as a recovery path, and how they handled storage left behind by the older 4.x governance pallets under the same names.
What it means
The interesting design choice is the subtraction. OpenGov as deployed on Polkadot carries many tracks and several bodies; this keeps the voting machinery and drops the institutions, on the stated ground that the community is small. That is an honest fit-to-size argument and it is rare — most small chains copy the large chain's structure and then cannot staff it.
The self-referential handover is the part worth noting: making the Sudo removal itself the first referendum means the mechanism is tested by the one action that cannot be undone if the mechanism does not work. The safety net exists only until that vote passes. Whether the 1% aye threshold on whitelisted calls is reachable in practice for a small holder base is the question the proposal is implicitly asking, and it is a turnout question rather than a design one.