Elements of Protocol Governance

Transcript

hey there I know you guys are having great time at edcon this is one of the best conferences in ethereum ecosystem thank you team for inviting me I'm Puja ranjan the horror and sheep at ethereum cathode is today I'm going to be talking about elements of protocol governance in next 18 20 minutes uh we will take a quick look into the past we'll try to understand the challenges with the governance especially when it comes to ethereum and what is the

current process so what is protocol governance governance in general means the process of decision making and management we all know ethereum is a decentralized blockchain it's has a great open source community so here decision making are the governance is basically a combination of technical rules and Community Driven decision making process what is this Community Driven decision-making process we'll try to find out in next few slides

in my earlier talk at edcon we had a deep dive into the process of standardization for a proposal in ethereum blockchain and we understood that when we are talking about upgrade we are talking about one specific category which is called standard track code so in next few uh slides whenever we are referring to an EIP we are mostly referring to this core eips because that's what is considered for an upgrade

ethereum started in 2015 and the process of selection of these eips and to organize upgrades where pretty much symbol since 2015 to 2019 and EIP had four statuses if that is a core EIP of course draft last call accepted and final so accepted here signifies that the client development team has accepted the proposal and they will be implementing in their respective clients so that proposal can be deployed on the minute at the same time by all declines

but this was till 2019 and I'm mentioning this because you would understand how ethereum grew prom 2019 till 2023 take a look at this tweet by Alex paragzazi exit has been a great contributor to ethereum ecosystem currently he is with Team Epsilon and he shared this tweet about the eips which are considered for different upgrades back in 2019.

if you can see starting from homestead where we deployed only three proposals by the time it reached to Byzantium we were having nine proposals so we understand the community was growing we were getting more proposals for an upgrade if you find this fascinating we would love to see the next one so here we are in 2019 with proposals for upgrade Istanbul check out the right hand side and you

will be surprised to see that we had received number of proposals for this particular upgrade obviously implementing all of them will be an add-on work to client team and it would be difficult to bring updates on mainnet development team started considering this to be addressed in a better way it clearly communicates that the participant of governance process are no more limited they are not just EIP author EIP editor or the clienter but

the community is now playing a greater role we need protocol support team to support the upgrade that we are having on the chain and that's how ethereum catalyst came into picture ethereum Caterers are a group of Community contributor to support ethereum blockchain at the time we identified a few challenges the topmost was the formalized process the process of governance the process of selection of EIP the process of deciding the timeline for the next upgrade

and how we can coordinate with the community they need to be informed so we can get better proposals and select the best out of those for an upgrade obviously documentation is needed to ensure that everybody is on the same page what we needed was better protocol upgrade communication since then ethereum cat hurdles have been supporting upgrades and let's take a look where we are today since 2015 ethereum has deployed 52 core

proposals on network 52 completing the deck of the card we did it with the different hard works and soft work so 50 proposals with hard folks and there were only two proposals which were deployed additionally via software on the ethereum network if people remember our earlier talk we discussed about Network upgrade process flow more or less We are following the same process flow we are still considering EIP into different phases and we are considering this upgrade to be done in three different phases one is consider

conclusion where we are discussing which proposal may or may not get in then if we have a consensus or rough consensus then we try to put them on devnet and after a few iteration of successful cabinet testing we move it to the main net phase there are a couple of elements that we have added since then number one is upgrade candidate now we are seeing a lot of proposals then it is important to get a list of all those active proposals which are into consideration so when you create an EIP you create a threat to discussion at Fellowship of ethereum magician and if you add the tag for that

upgrade for example here you can see eip4844 has Cancun candidate so if you add the tag people will be easily finding this proposal is being proposed for this particular upgrade similarly we started this meta Thread about upgrade so people be updated with the latest changes latest progress and the discussion that is happening on the code of meetings you can check out on the left hand side where tembeko is updating this meta thread with the latest discussion happening in the codep meeting I think this is a great way to keep

yourself updated with what's going on in ethereum and what proposals you should be expecting with the next upgrade in addition to that here we have few other resources that can help you understand these proposals better p penny is an educational video series by ethereum catheters where we deep dive into each proposals proposals which are considered for upgrade and also different categories of proposals as well like ERC interface meta and informational so we try to discuss these proposals and

understand why they are standard for ethereum Repository similarly I published this report called eips Insight every month and that's explains how many proposals are being proposed on ethereum repository every month and how we are moving those proposals from one status to another you can follow ethereum cat hurdles at YouTube and the link is added here in the slides it's at eth cat orders and you can find updated resource on eips Insight at the website eapsinsight.com

big picture I would like to take a few moments to uh probably discuss this picture because this is what I think is how we design governance how we follow the process in ethereum to decide for an upgrade so we have already discussed whenever we are talking about an upgrade ethereum Improvement proposal or EIP that we are talking about must be core so these core proposals are being discussed at different forums number one is fellowship of ethereum magician because that is mandatory you have to open a thread for discussion where people can discuss those proposals then these proposals are shared on acde and

AC DC meeting many of us know that ethereum is running two layers right now which is called execution layer and consensus layer so we have clients team for execution layer and consensus layer so we have this meeting every Thursday at 1400 UTC alternate week is for alternate team but we couldn't find all the teams on both the calls to discuss the proposal because ethereum is one chain sometimes it becomes difficult to discuss a proposal in length because there are other issues to be discussed on code and meetings so the Overflow discussion is moved towards the breakout

room meeting that means we discuss a proposal but we could not reach a consensus and we would like to discuss it further to evaluate if that proposal is the best to be selected for the network upgrade and that's where we have this breakout room meeting to discuss obviously the participant here mostly are EAP author and client development team to understand if this can be implemented on the network upgrade or not so we go back and forth discussing it at Fellowship of Athena magician client development uh meeting and uh then breakout room meeting and once we make a decision once we come to a rough

consensus if a proposal is dropped it is dropped but if it is accepted if it is uh like we are having consensus to test it maybe implement it on clients then these are added to the respective specs like execution specs and consensus specs mostly eaps are related to execution specs at least so far then you would find these uh eips listed on execution specs after implementing we test it on devnets devnets are test Nets especially for client development team it's not for a public usage as of now and these are a female that they can nuke it at any point of time there's no point that

anybody else should go and test their daps or something on these Donuts those are created then we are when we are fine with it like okay fine we can go ahead with it then we move it to the public test net and in between we have Community calls to provide additional support to community to the infrastructure provider and it is joined by the client development team so that if anyone on the call shows up with particular issue on a particular client it can be help people are always around you just need to be at the right place to seek the help and this is why we have opened these Community calls for

everyone to join you join your share your issues you talk to us and we'll be there to help you out so overall I feel like the governance in ethereum is not by a person it's not by a group but it's basically a process and we expect people EIP authors to follow this process so their respective proposal can be on the minute if that's the best one to go ahead with what's next we have started having upgrades focused or centered around a proposal if people remember when we did merge merge was

like change of uh the consensus mechanism from proof of work to proof of stake the center VIP was EAP 3675 recently we deployed chappella shapila was centered around the eat withdrawal and the proposal was 48.95 Duncan is the next upgrade that we are expecting which is a combination of janab and Cancun and uh the center EIP the anchor EIP here is eap4844 so recently it was announced in the code of meeting that dick parag could be centered around uof it's not for formally decided because we are way far

we are still into um Duncan mode like we are still working on having this upgrade on chain and parag will be followed but more or less all the proposals for eof from gencoon has been moved to Prague and that would be considered that could be considered the anchor EAP for the next upgrade when we are talking about this community when we are talking about uh the decentralized organization definitely we have challenges and challenges that's what we are trying to solve here some of the known challenges are awareness of the process and that's why I'm here today to talk to you about what is the process so you can share it with people

you know may be interested in contributing one day so we are working on that of course next big thing is EAP reviewers we do have a set of EAP editors who are helping us review these proposals but we would love to have more people on board if you are the one or you know someone who would be interested please reach out to eat cat hurdles and we'll be happy to help you out Erp number allocation um is uh one of the common issue that people are trying to solve these days we should be having some solution very soon we are in active development of a bar to assign these numbers automatically oh the biggest one EAP ercd post blood

it's an ongoing challenge like people are discussing that we should split EIP and ERC repo because ERC despite being one category of standard track is getting almost the equal number of proposal in fact oh more than that uh as the core eips and it becomes a Time challenging to you know give attention to both sort of proposals and the numbers are exploding here we are working in that direction and and we hope to continue working by this we are also suggesting that we continue receiving challenges and also hope to solve it with your help

if this interests you please join us on eipip meeting which is for process governance and if you are an author trying to write a proposal for ethereum a public court proposal if you want to put it on the main net and having issues or challenges or have questions join us at EIP editing officer should you have any question that this presentation this talk or anything related to EIP or the process in general reach me at pujaranjan19 I'm also available at cathered as discard thank you for having me today it's a

great pleasure talking to you all