wormhole/docs/governor.md

# Guardian Chain Governor
Below are admin controls surfaced to the Guardians for the Governor plugin. For
a background on the feature and its objectives, see [the whitepaper](../whitepapers/0007_governor.md).

## Default Behavior / Limits
The Chain Governor feature is disabled by default. Guardians can enable it by passing the following flag to the `guardiand` command when starting it up:

```bash
--chainGovernorEnabled=true
```

To observe the default chain limits, see `node/pkg/governor/mainnet_chains.go`.  Occasionally, these limits will be adjusted to stay in touch with notional drift associated with certain chains going up/down.

### Checking Status

To list the governor status for each chain, Guardians can run the `governor-status` admin command as follows:

```bash
guardiand admin governor-status --socket /path/to/admin.sock
```

When running in the local Tilt-based development environment, the command may be invoked as follows:

```bash
kubectl exec guardian-0 -- /guardiand admin governor-status --socket /tmp/admin.sock
```

The following data will be shown:

1. Chain ID / emitter address
2. Configured limit
3. Value published in the last 24 hours.
4. List of VAAs pending publishing For each VAA, list:
    1. Emitter chain ID and address
    2. Sequence number
    3. Token chain ID and address
    4. Receive time
    5. Value


For example:

```
chain: solana, dailyLimit: 100, total: 40, numPending: 1
   chain: solana, pending[0], value: 200, vaa: 1/c69a1b1a65dd336bf1df6a77afb501fc25db7fc0938cb08595a9ef473265cb4f/2, time: 2022-08-09 16:29:39.045960153 +0000 UTC m=+8370.131061963
chain: ethereum, dailyLimit: 100000, total: 0, numPending: 0

```

### Releasing VAAs

To manually release a pending VAA (identified by emitted chain ID / address and sequence number), Guardians can run the `governor-release-pending-vaa` admin command as follows:

```bash
guardiand admin governor-release-pending-vaa "emitted_chain_ID/address/sequence_number" --socket /path/to/admin.sock
```

NOTE: VAAs that are published this way will not affect the rolling 24hr limit.

When a VAA is released, it will be placed in a holding area until the next pending VAA check so there may be some delay for it to actually be published.

### Dropping VAAs

To manually remove a pending VAA (identified by emitted chain ID / address and sequence number), Guardians can run the `governor-drop-pending-vaa` admin command as follows:

```bash
guardiand admin governor-drop-pending-vaa "emitted_chain_ID/address/sequence_number" --socket /path/to/admin.sock
```