Payments from the new decentralized treasury infrastructure are currently blocked and will be delayed until a new consensus vote takes place to implement a change to the consensus rules. Contractor payouts will continue via the legacy treasury until the changes are deployed and activated.
No funds from either the decentralized treasury or from the legacy treasury are at risk of being lost.
The only practical consequences of this issue are some inconvenience for operators of the Contractors Management System (CMS), the need for a new consensus vote to happen, and some delay for the new treasury to effectively start working.
Over the next few releases, Decred will enable Proof-of-Stake (“PoS”) miners to vote on proposed consensus changes. This voting will allow Decred users to exercise sovereignty over whether or not to accept hard fork changes, in addition to making other important decisions. Enabling this decision making requires versioning several subsystems: block headers, vote transactions and transaction scripts. Versioning these subsystems allows for reliable and relatively smooth hard forking on an ongoing basis, meaning Decred can continuously upgrade its consensus code provided the PoS miners agree with each of the changes. Further, we have added a series of full-block consensus tests that are automatically run on every pull request to the …