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At @decent and Fractal, we're building tools and products necessary for onchain orgs to govern and operate.

In a convo with @shutter’s DAO 0x36 community members, the topic of "proposal length" was brought up. How can we know the exact time a proposal will expire?

Unfortunately, when tracking time with blocks, it's impossible to know. But we can make some assumptions.

👇

In most onchain governance systems, concepts of "time" are denominated in blocks.

"Hey!", you may be saying, "since Ethereum switched to PoS, blocks are exactly 12 seconds long!"

It's a bit more complicated than this in practice.

History lesson:

Execution Layer (EL) is where PoW used to exist. Block 0 was on Jul 15 2015. Currently at block ~19.26m.

Consensus Layer (CL) is where PoS now lives. Block ("slot") 0 was on Dec 1 2020. Currently at block ~ 8.46m.

Both sets of block numbers are marching on.

With Ethereum’s switch to PoS, *consensus layer* blocks happen every 12 seconds. If a proposer doesn’t create a block in time (block 100, for example), that block is missed, but the count goes on. The next proposer is working on block 101, not the missed 100.

On the execution layer, block numbers are different. When the consensus layer creates a new block, it associated the *next* execution layer block with it.

Execution layer blocks, therefore, are *never skipped*.

Example:

CL: 200 (proposed), EL: 1000
CL: 201 (proposed), EL: 1001
CL: 202 (missed), EL: n/a
CL: 203 (proposed), EL: 1002

Hopefully you see where this is going. We can assume (hope) that an execution layer block happens every 12 seconds, but that only occurs in perfect network conditions when no CL slots are missed.

In practice, CL proposers occasionally miss their slots, so “time slows down” on the execution layer when that happens (some blocks take 24 seconds (or 36!), not 12).

TL;DR:

In a healthy network with no missed CL slots, we can count on EL blocks happening every 12 seconds. But when CL slots are missed, EL blocks are delayed.

So when you're setting up a new DAO on Fractal or elsewhere, and you want to configure your proposal length to be 7 days:

7 days = 604800 seconds
604800 seconds / 12 seconds per block = 50400 blocks

50400 blocks is a good starting point. But know that in practice, this will be slighter longer than 7 days, depending on network conditions.

It’s true that Fractal (and many other onchain governance systems) use block numbers to determine when things happen. Specifically, block numbers in the execution layer, where we’re operating. Smart contracts only have access to execution layer blocks, not consensus layer blocks.