 I'm here to talk about Ethereum governance or one of the many ways to think about Ethereum governance. I suppose less philosophical It's entirely what is happening today. Who are the organizations involved? What's the history of it? First little bit about me I Have been involved in cryptocurrency since about 2011 I worked at a bank for a few years then Ethereum Foundation and I co-founded Okan Innovations And serve as an advisor there. I have one wife Laura top left and three cats Top right is Vivian bottom left is Fry and bottom right is Lelou So I'm gonna start with Vlad's definition of governance. It's the process by which we attempt to establish The legitimacy of decisions decision-making processes and related governance norms and expectations I just like that definition a lot. So I wanted to throw it into my slides I think it makes it really I think it really boils it down well for what most Blockchain governance discussions kind of come down to in a way So that's just kind of how I feel about the definition Okay, so let me give you a history of kind of what governance or the you know powers of Ethereum What what that was back in the day? So our 2014 early 2015 all clients and development tools were developed by the Ethereum Foundation all the co-founders were there all the first developers dev con zero had about 50 people and That's kind of where it was all centralized. You can think of it that way granted It was so small such a small project. You can't really blame it for not being decentralized yet 2015 to 2016 outside entities started to form and leave the Ethereum Foundation. We had stuff like consensus happening parody happened around 2016 I believe and Other stuff like that. I'm just keeping time and then 2016 Enterprise Ethereum discussion started on a Skype chat between a lot of enterprises who are starting to get interested in it and then eventually the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance formed More infrastructure is now being developed by third parties. We have MetaMask. We have Infura They probably started a little bit before 2016, but you should start seeing them be a lot more used And then 2017 Enterprise Ethereum brings traditional companies into Ethereum and that's more visible from a government and academic interest perspective You have IC3 from Cornell University. You have Stanford Harvard The Cambridge is another big one UCLA there's just a lot of different Blockchain organizations within colleges and academic institutions now. What is it now? It is Vitalik holding a Lambo Okay, so this is my favorite slide because it's the most aesthetically pleasing because it looks like Stare steps like climbing down and I didn't plan for it that way until I noticed that all of them could do that So yeah, my favorite slide Here the current major players in the ecosystem that kind of contribute to a lot of the decisions being made the direction that Ethereum is going things like that Consensus is a big hub and spoke model I guess company organization Conglomerate whatever you want to call it and it has a bunch of different teams that all work You know across teams and come up with their own projects and then eventually some of them spin out into their own companies Others stay in and provide infrastructure. It's kind of a very it's very hard to pin down what consensus is unless you've worked there so oh Even they don't know okay. Yeah, so then there's the web3 foundation, which is working really hard across different technologies including DFINITY Ethereum obviously Polkadot and others to bring about the web3 future that's been envisioned by people like Gavin Wood in the past parody technologies they Build the second biggest Ethereum client that was founded by Gavin Wood is one of the spin-offs from Ethereum Foundation The Ethereum Foundation they're hosting DevCon. I think they're pretty cool I work there and what they do is they provide funding support Grants other things to the Ethereum ecosystem. It's pretty much all about supporting the ecosystem and making sure things get done EA that's for enterprise Ethereum people Fellowship of Ethereum magicians is a disorganization as Boris put it of people coming together to make technical standards Or to not make but to basically review and talk about technical and sometimes philosophical standards within Ethereum We have the client devs They get together during the all-core developer meetings, which I'll show you a little bit more about in a second that is Those client devs You know to have a lot of input and they don't even always want it But that's kind of what they end up doing then we have a theorem improvement proposal editors This is like our IETF standards And I'm an EIP editor so is Nick Johnson for instance and Greg Colvin who's around here somewhere and so Then there's also highly used infrastructure tools such as infura my crypto and MetaMask and they have a good say in the ecosystem as well Here's an example of EIP's there's the front page of the EIP's repo It says, you know the status terms how to contribute the types and again the most famous example of an EIP is the ERC 20 token standard which defines the most basic type of token you can have in the Ethereum ecosystem that's cross-compatible Via the smart contracts it produces This is a screenshot of the core developer call This one in particular had about 30 people because it was a very contentious issue about issuance reduction core developer meetings happen every two weeks on Fridays, I think it's like 10 a.m. Eastern US time and What we do is we try not to talk about controversial topics unless we absolutely have to but it's all about low-level client and protocol development stuff What's the next hard fork happening? How do we fix the network layer if there's something wrong? What are we gonna do whenever ropston messes up? What's everyone's client updates? Every time there's a new client that comes out such as pantheon such as Exterium we invite them to the call at this point I believe there is nine clients that are compatible with the current Ethereum network, which is incredible and All of them are represented on this call The all-core devs call kind of sparked other calls including the e-wasm community call the plasma implementers call and the F implementers 2.0 call F implementers 2.0 call is incredibly interesting because it's people from across many many different ecosystem organizations Plasma implementers calls well is very very diverse. I would say It's hard for Vitalik to keep up attending all of these Because he's definitely someone who would be valued at all of these but there's just too many calls now too many Here's the problems the IPs in the all-core devs meetings are the only formal way with decisions are made The most technical stuff we don't have enough people to actually help us out on these things There's the same people making decisions over and over again because there's a lot to understand at the very complicated underlying Ethereum protocol And we have few good signaling systems or other methods to gauge community consensus whenever things happen You can think back to the Dow for example. That was a very hard decision At the time I can go on all day about the Dow But the point is it was hard to gauge the community sentiment at the time and then Eventually the call was made for what defaults were presented on the clients to go forward Solutions involve more diverse groups and participants bake a loaf of doge bread Create safe places for people to discuss things Encourage participation and outspoken opinions So safe places for discord is important because we don't want to become toxic like Bitcoin just straight up So in order to do that we need to have like a variety of places where we're all you know Just nice to each other and not assholes Encourage participation and outspoken opinions same vein just listen to people More governance structures Ethereum magicians came in and I believe they're saving the day right now because we just had the all-core dev meetings and EIPs and now they're coming in to really help structure the future of EIPs and other governance things with their rings model Which you may hear about later and then continuous improvement on current structures We're always trying to improve the core dev meetings the EIP process things like that Are we centralized nope? We're too disorganized to be centralized What can we do don't panic we need to develop good governance structures I Truly believe that the idea of figureheads are good early on in a blockchain project, but influence needs to be lessened over time specifically in the case of Vitalik You know he's been basically the earlier on he had a lot more influence and today He's stepping back into more of a research role, and you won't even see him on the core dev calls You won't see him commenting on major issues as much anymore He's out of the decision-making process in a lot of ways, and I think that's great And I think that's purposeful, and I mean I've confirmed that's purposeful from him so that's something that I think is really really important for The ecosystem to thrive and become more decentralized and more people take over And then look at tradition like old-school things like IETF and see how they're running and what you can do about things like rough consensus I'm at Hudson Jameson on Twitter and at Hudson Jameson comm. Thank you all so much. I hope I didn't go over my time