Ethereum’s ‘Hard’ Governance Process Is a Feature, Not a Bug, Says Tim Beiko

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim welcomes special guest Tim Beiko, who recently took over as chair of the bi-weekly All Core Developers (ACD) meetings. ACD calls bring together various Ethereum stakeholders to discuss and reach consensus on proposed changes to the Ethereum protocol. They are streamed live on YouTube and generally reach an audience of roughly 10,000 viewers for each call.

This episode is sponsored by 📷and The Sun Exchange.

For Beiko, the most nerve-racking thing about his newest role as chair of the ACD calls is setting up the YouTube livestream.

“Setting up the [Open Broadcaster Software] and all that for streaming and getting the audio right to the mic; this stresses me out so much because there was one call where I streamed it to everybody except myself,” Beiko said.

Before taking over this role from the previous chair, Hudson Jameson, Beiko had been an active participant in these calls for three years as product manager of one of the Ethereum software client teams.

As background, ACD calls are a long-running tradition in the Ethereum community that started as early as 2015. Aimed at bringing together and coordinating development of the Ethereum protocol, these meetings are a crucial component of the informal governance process that shapes the ongoing evolution of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

These calls, according to Beiko, are also how Ethereum protocol developers provide transparency to the broader community of the network, which includes a growing number of users, decentralized application (dapp) developers and investors.

“It’s very easy for core developers and folks like myself who are basically paid to be on the calls to spend time and prepare for them,” said Beiko. “But if that’s not your job, if you’re running an application or you’re a journalist, you don’t have five hours per week to spend on protocol development for Ethereum. So I’ve tried to summarize it … [and] find ways to describe to the community what’s happening so that folks can keep tabs on [Ethereum] but don’t need to invest hours.”

One area of continued discussion and debate is around the upcoming change to Ethereum’s fees, as outlined by Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559.

Beiko is confident the majority of users and dapp developers are in favor of activating EIP 1559 later this July. As for other stakeholders such as miners who have not been as enthusiastic about the upgrade, Beiko explained that there are other incentives he believes will encourage their support for the fee market change when it comes time for activation.

To hear Beiko’s full remarks on EIP 1559 implementation as well as more on the governance process around the other code changes that will be bundled along with EIP 1559, tune in to this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.”

Links mentioned in this podcast:

• What’s New In Eth2 (www.eth2.news)
• Valid Points (https://www.coindesk.com/newsletter/valid-points)
• London Network Upgrade Specification (https://github.com/ethereum/eth1.0-specs/blob/master/network-upgrades/mainnet-upgrades/london.md#ecosystem-readiness-checklist)
• Why EIP 1559? By Tim Beiko (https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/why-1559)
• Flashbots: Frontrunning the MEV Crisis (https://medium.com/flashbots/frontrunning-the-mev-crisis-40629a613752)