Bitcoin Foundation Voting Round Could End With No Clear Winners
CoinDesk examines how the Bitcoin Foundation's bylaws could affect the results of the current voting round to close today.

Following the sudden resignations of former BitInstant CEO Charlie Shrem and Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles earlier this year, the Bitcoin Foundation has been short two members for its Board of Directors, its key decision-making body.
Due to the ensuing fallout, many community members and current board members have expressed optimism that the newly elected candidates will reinvigorate the foundation at a time when it is seeking to bring bitcoin's message to mainstream consumers worldwide.
However, though the polls are scheduled to close just shy of midnight tonight, there remains the possibility that the current round of voting may end without any new members immediately being elected to its Board of Directors, Brian Goss, chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation’s election committee, told CoinDesk.
This is due to wording in the organization’s bylaws that requires candidates be elected by “a majority of quorum of Industry Members”. In the case of the Board of Directors election, candidates must exceed a threshold of votes in an approval score-style election in order to be elected.
Goss said that potential issues may arise because of this particular style of voting, stating:
"We used approval voting [where voters select as many candidates as they approve of] to increase the odds that any candidate gets above that very high hurdle. The hurdle is really high given the large number of candidates."
One potential outcome, Goss says, is that no candidate exceeds the threshold required to join the board.
Further, if one of the candidates is elected during the first round, a second round would need to be held in order to elect a second Industry Member, Goss said.
are in the running for the two open seats, a list which includes BTC China CEO Bobby Lee and Gyft co-founder and CEO Vinny Lingham.
The election previously began with a rocky start, as technology glitches led to voting delays. This resulted in a deadline extension from 28th April to 30th April.
Voting questions image via Shutterstock
More For You
Pudgy Penguins: A New Blueprint for Tokenized Culture

Pudgy Penguins is building a multi-vertical consumer IP platform — combining phygital products, games, NFTs and PENGU to monetize culture at scale.
What to know:
Pudgy Penguins is emerging as one of the strongest NFT-native brands of this cycle, shifting from speculative “digital luxury goods” into a multi-vertical consumer IP platform. Its strategy is to acquire users through mainstream channels first; toys, retail partnerships and viral media, then onboard them into Web3 through games, NFTs and the PENGU token.
The ecosystem now spans phygital products (> $13M retail sales and >1M units sold), games and experiences (Pudgy Party surpassed 500k downloads in two weeks), and a widely distributed token (airdropped to 6M+ wallets). While the market is currently pricing Pudgy at a premium relative to traditional IP peers, sustained success depends on execution across retail expansion, gaming adoption and deeper token utility.
More For You
Weaker dollar fails to spur bitcoin gains, but there's a reason for that, JPMorgan says

Gold and other hard assets are rallying on dollar weakness, but bitcoin is lagging as markets continue to treat it as a liquidity-sensitive risk asset.
What to know:
- Bitcoin has, unusually, not rallied alongside the slide in the U.S. dollar.
- JPMorgan strategists say the dollar’s weakness is being driven by short-term flows and sentiment, not changes in growth or monetary policy expectations, and they expect the currency to stabilize as the U.S. economy strengthens.
- Because markets do not view the current dollar decline as a lasting macro shift, bitcoin is trading more like a liquidity-sensitive risk asset than a reliable dollar hedge, leaving gold and emerging markets as the preferred beneficiaries of dollar diversification.











