🔎 [Analysis] The growing focus on blockchain governance – Chris McCoy

Without a clear, articulated governance structure, crypto protocols suffer from delayed decision-making and implementation as well as contentiousness around the validity of those decisions.

Today, a number of forces are increasing the broader crypto communities focus on governance, with implications not only for protocols but the developers, investors and communities that surround them. There are three reasons for the growing focus:

• The efficacy of the “governance-by-default” approach of Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH) is being tested
• A set of newly live protocols including EOS, Tezos, Dfinity and Decred are putting the governance conversation front and center by offering different versions of on-chain governance that they argue are superior to the off-chain approaches of the other protocols
• Growing institutional engagement with crypto assets means the importance of governance models is growing

While the problems with today’s governance models are numerous, a few stand out: efficacy and finality in “1.0” off-chain governance models, and plutocracy and populism in emerging “2.0” on-chain models.