How Polkadot transition Sudo into On chain governance?

Question

From my understanding, Polkadot has sudo governance in the initial phase. Currently, Polkadot completely changed into on-chain governance by pallet_democracy, pallet_membership, pallet_collective.

• How did Polkadot implement this transition?

• In the initial phase, Polkadot used sudo. This sudo key will configure in chain spec. If Polkadot removes sudo key, it's mean that Polkadot will change the genesis state -> Polkadot will reset the chain?

• When Polkadot had this transition? As calculation, it's approximately about 2 years 3 months ago.

Answer 1

One of the key features that Substrate is build around is the ability to perform runtime upgrades. This feature allows for the logic of a blockchain to change over time. Polkadot and Kusama both used this feature (that almost always requires root origin, that sudo and some governance pallets allow for, to remove the sudo pallet and put in place governance pallets to take over the only path to make a root origin call in the network.

You can discover when this event occurred by looking for runtime upgrade events in the history of the chain with tools like Substrate archive and discover the runtime used to update at each point along the way. Easiest way to discover the features of the runtime is likely the metadata including the version of the runtime (impl version) and look up the source code for this on the Polkadot repository releases that includes notes on what is included in the runtime for both networks, that will eventually be used to perform a runtime upgrade on the various relay chain networks listed.