Overview
Governance on Atomic is intentionally minimal. The protocol's core invariants - how positions open, how liquidations trigger, how lenders are paid - are coded into immutable contracts. There is no mechanism to vote them away.
What governance can touch is a small set of operational parameters: per-market leverage limits, minimum margin sizes, and aggregator routing preferences.
This page describes the governance design that will activate alongside V3. Until V3 launches, all parameter decisions are made by the core team in a transparent, change-logged process.
What governance can change
| Parameter | Scope | |---|---| | Per-market max leverage | Forward-looking only - existing positions unaffected | | Per-market min margin | Forward-looking only | | 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 | Lending pool has no admin withdrawal path |
| Position state in registry | Registry has no admin override |
If any of these need to change, it requires a new deployment and migration - not a governance vote against the live protocol. This is by design: it removes the attack surface of "elect to drain the protocol via governance."
Roadmap
Phase 1 - current
Core team makes parameter decisions transparently. Every change is announced in advance in the Discord and on the public changelog. No on-chain vote.
Phase 2 - V3 launch (target Q3 2026)
A council of long-tenured lenders + ecosystem participants reviews proposed parameter changes before they activate. Council membership is publicly listed; meetings are minuted.
This is advisory governance - it adds friction to parameter changes but does not yet move authority away from the team. Useful for catching bad ideas before they ship.
Phase 3 - progressive decentralization (target 2027+)
On-chain voting for the parameters in scope. The exact mechanism - token-weighted, lender-weighted, reputation-weighted - is open and depends on what works in Phase 2.
A token launch is not a precondition for this phase; reputation-based or stake-weighted mechanisms are equally viable.
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 the protocol. It will not be introduced as a fundraising vehicle, an airdrop bait, or a mechanism to extract value from users.
Atomic does not currently have a token. Anyone selling, listing, or pre-allocating an "Atomic token" is running a scam. When and if 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
All parameter changes - past and proposed - are listed on the public changelog: atomic.green/changelog.
Past examples: per-market leverage adjustments, aggregator priority swaps, listing decisions. The changelog is the canonical record of what governance has actually done, regardless of which phase the formal mechanism is in.