Governor
Who governors are, and what they can and can't do.
126 governors across 30+ countries vote directly on network rules — no company, and no single governor, controls STORE.
The rules
What a governor can and can't do
The stated minimum to register as a governor.
≈ $390,000 at STORE's current private, pre-launch price — a constitutional rule, not a guideline.
No single governor can ever cross this, enforced automatically.
The highest voting weight any governor has actually held, well under the ceiling.
Governance models
Decentralized infrastructure needs decentralized control.
Corporate control
One company's leadership decides. No vote.
Token-weighted governance
Whoever holds the most tokens has the most say — wealth is voting power.
STORE: one entity, one vote
Every governor gets exactly one vote, regardless of how much STORE they hold.
Hamilton's Law — STORE's own governance record
Constitutional ceiling — no single governor can ever cross this.
Highest any governor has ever held, across 126 governors today.
Every new governor makes the network harder to capture, not easier — architecturally opposed to Metcalfe's Law, not mathematically inverse — where networks concentrate power as they grow.
Why growth helps instead of hurts
Growth makes the network harder to capture
governors would need to collude
$420,000 minimum, at STORE's $10,000 governor minimum
governors would need to collude
Same ceiling, more people who'd have to agree to break it
governors would need to collude
The cost of capture scales with the size of the network
Where the one-third idea comes from
Not a new idea
The idea that no single actor should hold more than a third of the power isn't new. It shows up, independently, across very different eras:
Roman Republic
~500 BCE
Tribunes could block the majority — minority veto power.
Iroquois Confederacy
Before 1450 CE
No single nation could out-vote the others.
Third Lateran Council
1179 CE
Required a two-thirds majority to elect a Pope.
U.S. Constitution
1787
Alexander Hamilton built two-thirds supermajority locks into it, more than once.
Leslie Lamport
1982
Proved mathematically that distributed systems need the same one-third threshold to stay fault-tolerant.
Lateran and Lamport are the two places where the exact two-thirds threshold was derived independently, 800 years apart. The others are earlier examples of the same instinct — not identical proofs. STORE's governance ceiling applies the Lamport version: no single governor above one-third.
How a proposal becomes a rule
- 1Submission
- 2A minimum community review period
- 3A democratic voting window
- 4The rule takes effect only if it passes