Trust the people.
That principle is at the heart of a new trend in the blockchain industry, where regulators of different networks form groups of people to help direct protocol changes and ensure security.
The purpose of these ‘protocol councils’, also called ‘security councils’, is to push emerging networks towards increasing decentralization by gradually wresting control from their original developers. Before they completely cut the cord, where the networks actually run automatically, or subject to some kind of democratic process, the idea is that a panel of well-meaning people can serve as the ultimate guardians – able to intervene quickly if an emergency arises, or be able to put the final signature on major protocol changes.
The cynicism can be forgiven: shouldn’t these distributed ledgers decentralize everything? There are also sighs (or even groans) over the observation that the blockchain industry is already filled with groups of people, seemingly created out of nowhere, who often have very little purpose other than for members to brag about being busy in some way . plate.
The projects argue that these protocol councils are a necessity as the industry matures.
Polygon, Ethereum’s layer 2 network, has a ‘Protocol Council’ of thirteen people. Arbitrum, another major Ethereum-focused layer-2, has a “Security Council”, while Optimism also has a ‘Security Council’.
“This is a necessary evil,” Mehdi Zerouali, the director of Sigma Prime, a blockchain security company, said in an interview. He is a member of the Polygon board. “It is clear that we still trust that that group of thirteen people is not colluding. I could possibly launch just like this campaign, which I feel like, reach out privately and then convince everyone to sneak in a bug and share the proceeds with them. That is a risk.”
“This is why these 13 people are public-facing people who have a strong reputation in the Ethereum space and are already trusted by Ethereum users,” Zerouali added.
What is the Protocol Council?
Polygon formed its protocol council in October, with the express mandate to oversee any major or emergency changes to the core protocol. The members of the team are leading figures in the Ethereum ecosystem and are charged with running “the community-led process to initiate future upgrades,” according to a blog post.
These tasks are actually divided into two types of scenarios: first, regular protocol upgrades, such as adding new or removing features to the blockchain; and second, if there is an imminent threat to the protocol itself; in such situations the group can bypass the traditional governance framework.
For non-urgent updates, the council follows similar processes as other protocols. On Polygon, anyone can Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP), which then goes through a governance and community process. Once consensus is reached, the members of the council, the ‘signatories’, are responsible for initiating the change.
This is done via a multi-signature vault, a kind of crypto wallet that requires several private keys to sign off so that smart contracts can perform certain tasks. During a regular protocol change, Polygon needs seven of the thirteen members to sign off, while in an emergency they need ten council members.
“Our responsibility is to ensure that the governance proposals match the specification, and to ensure that what we are going to push to the chain is exactly what is described in the PIP,” Zerouali said. “And once we feel comfortable with that, there will be a bit of due diligence involved for the thirteen parties. And once the thirteen parties agree with what they have seen, it is about approving a specific transaction via a secure multisig.’
‘Training wheels’ for decentralization
The purpose of this council is to be an intermediate step towards decentralization – by allowing the protocol to control itself through code, which runs automatically, as it were – in accordance with the will of a community of network users.
Having boards is akin to using “training wheels,” Georgios Konstantopoulos, head of technology at crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, told CoinDesk in an interview. They are “something you use to keep something bad from happening.”
“Ethereum consensus is controlled by code. We have the Beacon Chain and it took us seven years to fully get there,” says Jerome de Tychey, creator of EthCC and another member of Polygon’s Protocol Board. “So I think it takes less time for Polygon to reach that kind of maturity.”
The Arbitrum Security Council consists of twelve members, who are elected through the Arbitrum DAO. The council is divided into two groups and elections are held every six months to fill those seats. According to to a blog post from the Arbitrum DAO, no more than three candidates from the same organization can sit on the security council at the same time.
Optimism’s Security Council also operates similarly to Polygon’s. According to In a blog post, Optimism’s security for its mainnet also relies on a multisig wallet (with multiple signatures), although Optimism stated that council members who have access to the multisig are anonymous. “Members are anonymous to make it harder to compromise the multisig.”
The councils are being touted as an alternative to other governance structures short of full decentralization, such as the “foundations” that oversee many blockchain projects.
“With other protocols you still have the basics, where you control almost 100% of the management of the protocol. L2s, where I think the security model is very explicit: we trust the foundation,” Zerouali said. “That foundation may be able to act in ways that are not necessarily in alignment with the community.”
On the other end of the spectrum, the protocols are resilient and robust when it comes to bugs or protocol changes. “This is a pipe dream at the moment, especially when we are dealing with ZK technology which is relatively new, untested and certainly has not stood the test of time in recent years,” Zerouali said.
“That side of the spectrum isn’t really an option at this point for ZK protocols, zkEVMs, just because of A) the very high risk of code bugs being introduced at different layers, the provers, the sequencers, the contracts themselves, and B) the need for constant upgrades.” These elements of the blockchain architecture can be prone to failure.
“So for emerging L2 technologies like Optimism, Arbitrum and zkEVMs, when they go live, they’re going live on something that’s been battle-tested, but not field-tested, with a lot of different things,” De told Tychey. Coin Bureau.
“That’s why these technologies tend to rely on councils to provide insight into arranging various things that implementers may not have thought of, or point fingers at incentive directions that haven’t been explored as part of the audits of the new implementation, etc.,” said De Tychey.
Read more: Polygon proposes a Council for ‘Decentralized Governance’, appointing 13 members