feat(platform)!: elected contracts declare their own election delay, read by the electionOpen reference requirement

[QuantumExplorer]

Issue being fixed or feature implemented

PR #4913 let a contract reference fix a delay in seconds between the referenced contract's creation and the referring document, so a moderation team cannot be seated on a contract before anyone has seen it. Sam asked for the delay to be the moderated contract's own: each contract declares how much notice it gives before its first election, and the charter that opens the contest only asks whether that notice has passed, without carrying a number.

What was done?

• On the elected declaration (ElectedModerators, packages/rs-dpp/src/data_contract/config/moderation/elected.rs): a new optional, unbounded field electionDelay, seconds after the contract's creation before the first charter may be filed against it. Left out, the election may be called at once. It is frozen with the rest of the declaration (the freeze test covers it), absent from the wire form when not declared, and ElectedModerators::election_is_open(contract_created_at, block_time_ms) reads it. Because config update v2 refuses declaring elected moderation after creation, the contract's creation is the declaration's own time, so nothing new is recorded. A contract with a delay and no recorded creation time is of unknown age and never opens.
• On the reference: the moderation requirement's closed set gains "electionOpen": the contract declares elected moderation and its own delay has passed at the block time of the write, or it declares none. The charter that opens the contest declares it on its targetContractId:

"refersTo": {
  "type": "contract",
  "contractRequirements": { "moderation": "electionOpen" }
}

Both values have a user in the charter contract: a charter proposal only needs the target elected, so teams can form during the notice the contract gives, while the charter that opens the contest needs its election electionOpen.

Unmet is the existing ReferencedContractRequirementNotMetError (40135) with field moderation and required electionOpen. No new error code or discriminant. The check runs against the contract already fetched for the existence check, so it costs no further read.

• Declaration and clients: meta-schema v3 enum ["elected", "electionOpen"], parser message listing both, wasm-dpp2 ContractModerators type gains electionDelay?: number and the reference surface moderation?: 'elected' | 'electionOpen'.
• Docs: v14 changelog items 22 and 24 extended in place; the book's elected moderation section describes the delay and the requirement. The book sentence from feat(platform)!: contract references may require a minimum age of, and time since the last update to, the referenced contract #4913 that motivated minimumSecondsSinceUpdate with "an old contract updated to declare elected moderation" was wrong, since an elected declaration cannot be added by an update; it now says that requirement is for other uses than the charter. minimumAgeSeconds and minimumSecondsSinceUpdate stay as the general numeric forms.

Follow-up: in the charter contract (#4898), the proposal type keeps "moderation": "elected" and the type that opens the contest declares "moderation": "electionOpen".

How Has This Been Tested?

• rs-dpp: elected declaration round trip with and without the delay (absent, not null, when none), the defaults test, election_is_open (no delay, one millisecond short, exact boundary, unknown age, saturation), Display, the config update freeze test with the delay as an eighth change, the reference value's is_met_by on a fixture contract (no moderation, elected without delay, elected with delay before and after it passes, unknown age), parser and meta-schema acceptance of electionOpen, and the existing reference tests. 67 targeted tests green.
• drive-abci: new fixture reference-validation-contract-election-open-contract-ref.json; five creation tests: referenced contract not elected (40135), elected without delay (success, even without a recorded creation time), created one millisecond less than its delay before the block (40135, field moderation, required electionOpen), delayed contract without a creation time (40135), created exactly its delay before the block (success). The existing contract-reference, moderation gate and no-locking contest tests still pass.
• cargo check -p wasm-dpp2 --target wasm32-unknown-unknown, clippy on dpp and drive-abci, rustfmt.

Breaking Changes

Consensus, under the unreleased protocol version 14: the elected declaration gains an optional field, so its encoding changes for contracts that declare a delay, and a contract reference may now refuse a write by 40135 under a new requirement value.

Checklist:

• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
• I have added or updated relevant unit/integration/functional/e2e tests
• I have added "!" to the title and described breaking changes in the corresponding section if my code contains any
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation if needed
• If I added or changed GroveDB structure, I described it in the area's structure.rs, regenerated grovedb-structure.json, and checked the structure viewer link posted on this pull request

For repository code-owners and collaborators only

• I have assigned this pull request to a milestone

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 1a561f2 and b1c9b94.

📒 Files selected for processing (16)

• book/src/data-model/contract-moderation.md
• packages/rs-dpp/schema/meta_schemas/document/v3/document-meta.json
• packages/rs-dpp/src/data_contract/config/methods/validate_update/v2/mod.rs
• packages/rs-dpp/src/data_contract/config/moderation/elected.rs
• packages/rs-dpp/src/data_contract/config/moderation/mod.rs
• packages/rs-dpp/src/data_contract/document_type/class_methods/try_from_schema/mod.rs
• packages/rs-dpp/src/data_contract/document_type/property/mod.rs
• packages/rs-dpp/src/validation/meta_validators/mod.rs
• packages/rs-drive-abci/src/execution/validation/state_transition/state_transitions/batch/tests/document/creation.rs
• packages/rs-drive-abci/src/execution/validation/state_transition/state_transitions/batch/transformer/v0/contract_moderation_gate/mod.rs
• packages/rs-drive-abci/src/execution/validation/state_transition/state_transitions/contract_user_moderation/tests.rs
• packages/rs-drive-abci/tests/supporting_files/contract/reference-validation/reference-validation-contract-election-open-contract-ref.json
• packages/rs-platform-version/src/version/v14.rs
• packages/wasm-dpp2/src/consensus_error.rs
• packages/wasm-dpp2/src/data_contract/document_type_reference.rs
• packages/wasm-dpp2/src/data_contract/model.rs

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Updated at 2026-09-22T16:11:04.233Z

[thepastaclaw]

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[QuantumExplorer]

Approved