Governance In Ethereum-land

Technical coordination in the Ethereum ecosystem

What I work on: DevOps and Community Organizing

Technical Standard

A formal document which establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes, and practices.

It takes a lot of coordination for a standard to be adopted!

Ethereum standard in use today: ERC-20

Internet standard in use today: ASCII

Live, open systems are built with technical standards

Usually changes are worked in with minimal disruption

This requires a lot of coordination!

ARPANET

• Originators worked to specify, program, and test the protocols that would run on BBN's nodes


• "RFCs" helped with coordination across long distances


• How did the internet pioneers make decisions?


• How did they deal with the stakeholders?

ARPANET in 1971

ARPANET in 1977

Early Internet Governance Culture

Historical Context

• 1950s: DARPA created to rapidly develop emerging technologies


• Trust was put in the agency in order to enable a culture of innovation, projects like ARPANET were funded


• Attracted great managers and engineers, many were hippies


• 1970s: brain drain to industry (e.g. Xerox PARC -> Adobe)

Early Internet Governance Culture

Key Traits

• Multi-stakeholder goverance


• Open process


• Favoring coordination over control


• Philosophical goal: “free and open Internet”

Early Internet Governance Culture

"We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code."

- David Clark of the IETF

Early Internet Governance Culture

At UCLA, discussions next to the "Interface Message Processor"

Internet Governance - Institutions

Appears messy, but facilitates technical responsibility

• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
• Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)
• Internet Architecture Board (IAB)
• Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
• Internet Society (administrative entity)

Internet Governance - Process

Described in RFC-2026

• Decisions are consensus-based


• Email lists and in-person meetings


• Steps include draft -> adoption as a Standard -> publishing


• Extensive process/culture for conflict resolution

Internet Governance - Technical Leadership

How crucial is technical leadership?

Internet Governance - Technical Leadership

Early work on ARPANET IANA: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Co-autored RFCs that led to DNS Died in 1998

• Challenged the US government to let go of its control over DNS via the "DNS Root Re-direction Test"

Before we get into Ethereum gov...

Some Resources to open up

Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs)
👉 https://eips.ethereum.org/

Magicians' Forum
👉 https://ethereum-magicians.org

Cat Herders
👉 https://www.ethereumcatherders.com

Is standards-building different in Ethereum-land?

"Internet" vs. "Open, Public Blockchains"

• Network Protocols, Data Formats
• Security Concerns
• End-users
• Valuable, live infrastructure
• Philosophical goals
• Navigating power structures

Is Ethereum standards-building different?

• Uncensorable, open network w/ adamant data


• Thousands of users, billions of dollars depend on it working (not different)


• Controversy and drama (not different from IETF drama)


• Long road from proposal, to prototype, to testing, to deployment (not different)


• ETH is Money

Opportunities to contribute

• Open process to "manage the commons"


• Anyone can propose! There is no "membership required"


• Proposals often get expert input


• Documenting previous work, building prototypes, etc. highly appreciated

Standards in constant use today

ERC-20: Specifying a tradeable token

EIP: Ethereum Improvement Proposal

EIPs describe standards for the Ethereum platform, including core protocol specs, client APIs, and contract standards.

ERCs

A type of EIP which describes application-level standards and conventions, including contract standards.

Core EIPs

A type of EIP which requires a consensus fork!

DeFi-related proposals

Like the protocol itself, each DeFi system has a community with its own process, proposals, and culture.

Core Governance: From proposal to mainnet

1. Conceptualization / "primordial soup"


2. The EIP workflow


3. The network upgrade process

Core Governance: EIP workflow

• Goal: create high quality proposals, evaluated by the community


• Sketching out the idea, submitting the document (EIP Editors)


• The proposer seeks competent input (Magicians' Forum)


• The proposer seeks buy-in from stakeholders

Core Governance: EIP workflow

The EIPs are in a git repo!

"Because the EIPs are maintained as text files in a versioned repository, their revision history is the historical record of the feature proposal."

https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs

Core Governance: EIP workflow

EIP-1: Process and Template

Start by reading over "EIP-1"!

The Core EIP and upgrade process was recently improved by the Ethereum Cat Herders, however the ERC process remains the same.

https://eips.ethereum.org

Core Governance: network upgrade process

• Goal: maintain a healthy, evolving network


• Cat Herders organize the process


• Hard Fork Coordinators manage the evaluation and scheduling for inclusion in an upgrade


• "core devs" implement the proposals and decide if they should be included in a HF

Core Governance: where it comes together

The "core devs" calls

• Protocol client developers and HF coordinators


• Finding consensus about each proposal


• Open process


• Calls are posted to Youtube

Core Governance: where it comes together

Ethereum Governance Is Widespread

Anything you might be interested probably has governance
(or needs it ASAP!)

• Core protocol
• Scaling solutions
• Wallet-related standards
• Token and smart contract infrastructure
• DeFi systems
• DAOs - systems for on-chain coordination

Ready to propose? Or want to help out?

Join a discussion on
https://ethereum-magicians.org

Don't be shy! We're friendly.

Join in the discussion to learn or to help others

Resources

Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs)
👉 https://eips.ethereum.org/

Magicians' Forum
👉 https://ethereum-magicians.org

Cat Herders
👉 https://www.ethereumcatherders.com