Who Controls Ethereum?
Governance on Ethereum doesn’t relate to how developers build applications or how users transact on the blockchain. Instead, it deals with the core changes to the protocol, which are crucial to developing the protocol’s security, decentralization, and scalability.
Ethereum’s governance procedures occur off-chain, where stakeholders come together to discuss and determine necessary changes. These stakeholders include:
- Token holders – These are stakeholders holding a significantly large amount of ETH tokens
- Developers – These stakeholders run software on the protocol or build interactive tools like wallets.
- Validators – These are stakeholders who add new blocks to the chain.
- Node operators – These users run a full copy of the Ethereum blockchain independently, without contributing to the transaction validation process.
- Other stakeholders include EIP authors, Protocol developers, and application users.
The formal process for introducing code changes for the protocol is through an Ethereum Improvement Proposal or EIP. You would gain community support for the EIP before proposing it to core developers for Ethereum.
- Cryptography – A study of secure communications techniques in an adversarial environment
- Metadata – Data that describes some other data. Ex. the caption describing an image
- Whitepaper – Information document used to promote or highlight the features of a solution to a problem, product, or service
Next Steps
If you feel prepared, take our Introduction to Bitcoin and Blockchain quiz:
- Ethereum Governance. ethereum.org. (n.d.). Retrieved October 28, 2022, from https://ethereum.org/en/governance/#:~:text=Any%20ETH%20holder%20was%20able,over%2085%25%20of%20the%20votes
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