It's Time to Walk-the-Talk on Decentralized Governance

In 2019, governance proved essential to moving decentralized communities forward.

Open, accountable decision-making avoids some of the mistakes of the ICO run-up when governance was more buzzword than a creed startups lived by.

Still, a renewed focus on these topics in 2019 has been positive and healthy for the industry, even though there is a ways to go next year as we work on how we talk about governance and how to implement it.

In 2019, there were notable governance successes and notable governance failures.

DevCon, the ethereum conference in October, proved that crypto people want equal governance as an active goal of crypto projects.

The crypto governance experiment entered its fifth year in 2019, with notable projects making long-term commitments to governance including Dash, AragonOne, and Tezos.

Even these established projects with significant governance infrastructure have yet to fully evolve into a truly autonomously governed entity known as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

At the same time we had all these governance initiatives, 2019 was the year of one of the biggest governance failures in history, with $4 billion dollar blockchain EOS degenerating into a special-interests controlled oligarchy of block producers voting themselves into power for short-term profiteering.

For the majority of projects with governance features, the incentives alignment nut was not fully cracked in 2019.

Truly decentralized governance needs to take input from all stakeholders involved, which requires strong personalities to share the podium.