Governance

ExtenSilica operates as interim technical steward of the public RISC-V extension registry and the .xsil package format. Our goal is neutral, long-term governance — including transfer to RISC-V International or an affiliated foundation when the catalog, processes, and community are ready.

ExtenSilica is an independent project and is not affiliated with RISC-V International. References to ratified or draft extensions are descriptive; canonical specifications remain with their standards bodies.

We coordinate open technical work on the registry:

• Versioned .xsil packages and upstream provenance
• Extension identity, encoding, CSR, dependency, and specification metadata
• Optional simulator, toolchain, RTL, test, example, and hardware artifacts
• Immutable releases, checksums, citations, deprecation, and ownership claims
• XSIL governance points — non-monetary rewards for verified catalog contributions and governance participation
• External citations and canonical CFF / BibTeX on each Extension page for academic reuse

We do not hold funds, process payments, set prices, or broker contracts on the platform. Optional funding-contact fields on implementation requests point to off-platform arrangements only; they are not offers, escrow, or payment rails.

There are no paid tiers, marketplace fees, wallets, or payout states in the registry schema. That boundary exists so a future foundation can absorb the codebase without inheriting financial custody.

Transfer readiness is measured by transparent operations, not promises:

• Public adoption metrics on the adoption dashboard
• Documented contribution and citation practices
• Apache-licensed platform code and a contributor license agreement (CLA)
• No financial schema drift in the database or API

When governance moves to a foundation, package contents remain under their upstream licenses; only platform code and operational runbooks transfer.

XSIL records verified contribution and governance participation. ExtenSilica does not sell XSIL; contributors earn it through reviewed engineering work.

Proposals and votes run on the ExtenSilica DAO on Aragon (Base).

See Contributing for how to publish, maintain, and improve extension packages. Questions about stewardship can be directed through the contact channels listed in our Terms of Service.