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The current RAC is an explicitly time-bound Transition RAC. The DAO must elect a Permanent RAC to act as trustees who action the community's will – appointing contributors and agreeing contracts for marketing, business development, market making, and wallet/engine development. Community discussion frames the role as high-level (like a company board on a 6–12 month budget horizon), initially unpaid, with paid roles requiring a separate community vote.

Where it stands (August 2026)

Nominations opened before the process did. On 15 July 2026 Timan Rebel posted an RFP self-nominating for the permanent RAC, and several other community members put themselves forward in that thread and in a parallel volunteer delegate-candidate RFP carrying a business and finance remit. Both threads were still drawing replies at the end of July.

What did not exist was the machinery to hold the vote. The Consultation app instance in use through July handles temperature checks and proposals but not elections; the DAO-dedicated instance announced on 4 August is the first build extended to support them, by the same Timan Rebel standing as a candidate. That places this card behind the Constitutional Proposal in the queue, since the constitutional vote is the new instance's first job.

The 13 August 2026 RAC update

The Transition RAC's status update of 13 August 2026 settled three of this card's open parameters and left the fourth – a date – open. The council will seat seven members. At least seven people have already declared a willingness to stand, there is no cap on candidates, and the council encourages more to come forward on the grounds that a contested field is the point. The election cannot open until the Charter is ratified, because the Charter is where the election's process and conditions are set – so this card sits behind ratification, which in turn waits on Consultation V2. No date is attached to any of the three.

The ballot will use Majority Judgment, which the council confirms is being implemented into the Consultation dApp for this election. Every voter grades every candidate on one shared scale, and seats go by the strength of a candidate’s grade across the whole electorate rather than by who is named on the most ballots. Textbook Majority Judgment settles that grade at the median; the Radix implementation does not, and pins it instead to a stated fraction of turnout. Under Proposal & Voting Framework §6.2.4 a candidate's grade is the highest one that three-fifths of the voting power cast placed them at or above, the same share-of-turnout test the framework's other mechanism applies at its approval threshold. The framework calls that point the Grade Quantile and says in terms that it is not the median. Most of the electorate will not have met the method before, and the council asks candidates and voters to raise doubts about how it works ahead of the ballot rather than during it.

The mechanism is deployed and has never been run. The governance component the framework routes through carries a majority_judgment_elections key-value store with its own counter, and read live at epoch 334782 on 14 August 2026 that majority_judgment_election_count is 0, as are proposal_count and temperature_check_count. See Radix governance for how that component relates to the earlier Consultation instance the transition votes have actually run on.

The election's own parameters, read from the ledger (23 August 2026)

The terms this election will run under are now on-chain, and they add two conditions the framework text does not state. Among the five parameter sets written into the governance component on 12 August 2026 is one keyed dao-election and labelled Majority Judgement Election, and it is the only entry of the five that does not use the ordinary proposal shape. Its temperature-check stage runs 3 days rather than five, at the same 405,249,777 XRD quorum and 50% approval as everything else. The election itself runs 7 days at a quorum of 945,582,814 XRD – the Governance Process tier, not the constitutional one – and carries a minimum_median_grade of Good.

That grade floor is the first addition. Seats go to the strongest qualifying grades; the deployed parameters also set an absolute bar, so a candidate whose qualifying grade lands below Good is not seated on the strength of being the best of a weak field. The second is what happens when the bar is not cleared: the set carries a 14-day rerun at the same quorum and the same minimum median grade, and a 90-day reserve list. A tie has an explicit path too – record_majority_judgment_tie_resolution takes an ordered list of candidates and writes it to the ledger, so a resolution is published rather than merely announced.

Every step of the machinery is owner-gated. Opening an election, starting round one, starting a rerun and recording a tie resolution are all restricted to the holder of the Consultations Admin Badge, as set out on the Consultation v2 card; only vote_on_majority_judgment_election, which takes an account, an election, a round and a set of candidate grades, is public. Read live at epoch 337,473 on 23 August 2026, majority_judgment_election_count is still 0. The rules are set, the front end is live at vote.radixdao.org, and the ballot has not opened, because the ratification this card sits behind has not been put.

The election has a proposal now, and it is a scaffold (26 August 2026)

The vote exists as a numbered document. GP-ELECT-1, Permanent RAC Election sits in the DAO’s operative governance repository, and its own first line calls it a draft scaffold that is not ready for submission. It places itself third in a four-step founding sequence: framework ratification, formation, this election, then the Activation Vote. Seating the council satisfies Activation Condition 7 of the Operating Agreement and is a precondition of the fourth step. It does not end the transition. The Transition Period ends on the Activation Date, when the Activation Vote passes, so a seated Permanent RAC will sit for a while alongside a company that is still member-managed and a governance process whose outcomes are still advisory.

Two points in the document correct what this card said above. The mechanism is not a choice anyone makes: Majority Judgment is the default under the Elections and Role Governance Policy, the Transition RAC has no power to depart from it, and running the two-stage alternative instead would take a separate Governance Process proposal in force before the nomination window opens. And grades do not settle at a median. The framework names the settling point the Grade Quantile, fixes it at three-fifths of the voting power cast, and records it as counting mechanics rather than a threshold, so it cannot be tuned from one election to the next. The contract deployed to mainnet still names its floor minimum_median_grade; the rulebook that floor answers to calls the same quantity the MJ Minimum Qualifying Grade and sets it at Good.

Four gates the rulebook puts on the seat

The DAO Parameters Registry §3A.5 attaches four conditions to this election, and not one of them is on the ballot.

  • Five seats, not seven, is the bar for activation. The council intends seven. §5.1 sets the Permanent RAC at between five and seven, fixed per election, with a floor of five, and §3A.5 requires five members duly elected and formally seated before the Activation Vote can be put.
  • KYC before seating is mandatory. Every elected member must complete Tier 1 verification before taking the seat, to satisfy the Operating Agreement’s definition of Seated and the §114(1)(d) natural-person-control requirement that comes with the DUNA wrapper. Winning the vote is not the same as holding the seat.
  • The election must open within 90 days of ratification. The registry gives the reason in its own description: so the election cannot be stalled. The clock starts when the framework is ratified, not when the council is ready.
  • Seating comes before the Activation Statement. Members must be seated before the Transition RAC publishes the document recording every Activation Condition as met.

Two more numbers sit in §6B and bear on who will stand. The term is six months, renewed automatically unless challenged inside a 14-day window that opens 21 days before expiry, and a challenge can be filed by anyone holding 0.1% of eligible voting power. Continuous service in one role is capped at four consecutive terms, two years, after which a full election is mandatory.

The counters have not moved. Read live at epoch 338,336 on 26 August 2026, the governance component still reports majority_judgment_election_count, proposal_count and temperature_check_count at 0. That is 3,554 epochs after this card’s first reading on 14 August and 863 after its second on 23 August, with nothing put to the component in between.

Deliverables

  • Agree council size and mandate (build on the 5-member approval-vote precedent; some argue 7).
  • Run the election via the ratified RFC → TC → RFP process and the governance app.
  • Define the boundary between "community will at a high level" and RAC operational discretion within approved budgets.
  • Set conflict-of-interest and (un)paid-role rules before seating members.

Dependencies & cross-references

Sources

HydrateLast updated Sep 1, 2026v1.4.18 revisionsVerified Aug 26, 2026