Overview
Governance on Atomic is deliberately minimal. The core invariants - how positions open, how liquidations trigger, how lenders get paid - are coded into immutable contracts. There's no mechanism to vote them away.
What governance does touch is a small set of operational parameters: per-market leverage caps, aggregator routing preferences, and which assets get listed.
This page describes the governance design that will activate in a future phase. Until then, parameter decisions are made by the core team and announced in advance on the changelog.
What governance can change
| Parameter | Scope |
|---|---|
| Per-market max leverage | Forward-looking only. Existing positions unaffected. |
| Aggregator priority (KyberSwap vs 0x) | Real-time. |
| Bug bounty reward bands | Forward-looking. |
| Keeper bounty schedule | Forward-looking, with grace period. |
| New market listings | Adds, not removes. |
What governance cannot change
| Property | Why it's immutable |
|---|---|
| 88% liquidation threshold | Coded in AtomicTrading. No admin function exists. |
| 25% lender revenue share | Coded in AtomicLendingPool. |
| 20 bps trading fee | Coded in AtomicTrading. |
| Lender principal | The lending pool has no admin withdrawal path. |
| Position state in registry | The registry has no admin override. |
Changing any of these means a new deployment and migration, not a governance vote against the live protocol. That removes the "elect to drain the protocol via governance" attack surface entirely.
Roadmap
Phase 1 - today
The core team makes parameter decisions. Every change is announced ahead of time in Discord and on the changelog. No on-chain vote.
Phase 2 - advisory council
A council of long-tenured lenders and ecosystem participants reviews proposed parameter changes before they activate. Membership is publicly listed; meetings are minuted.
Advisory governance. Adds friction to parameter changes but doesn't yet move authority away from the team. Useful mainly for catching bad ideas before they ship.
Phase 3 - progressive decentralisation (target 2027+)
On-chain voting for the parameters above. The exact mechanism - token-weighted, lender-weighted, reputation-weighted - depends on what works in Phase 2.
A token launch is not a precondition. Reputation-based or stake-weighted designs are equally workable.
Why no token
Atomic's economics are designed to work without a governance token:
- Lender yield comes from real fees, not token emissions. No token to distribute as yield.
- Trader incentives are the reputation system (XP, fee tiers), not token rewards.
- Protocol revenue funds development directly. No token-treasury indirection.
A governance token may be introduced later if and when on-chain voting genuinely improves things. It won't be introduced as a fundraising vehicle, an airdrop bait, or a way to extract value from users.
Atomic doesn't have a token. Anyone selling, listing or pre-allocating an "Atomic token" is running a scam. If and when a token launches, the announcement will come through the official channels (app.atomic.green, the Atomic Discord, the official X account) - never through DMs.
Changelog
Past and proposed parameter changes are on the public changelog: atomic.green/changelog.
Examples so far: per-market leverage adjustments, aggregator priority swaps, listing decisions. Regardless of which phase the formal mechanism is in, the changelog is the canonical record of what governance has actually done.