The Governance and Decentralization of Ethereum

Ethereum's governance model is a paradigm of decentralization. Unlike traditional companies, Ethereum's upgrades and decisions are driven collectively by the community, including developers, miners (now stakers), users, and the foundation. Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) are at the core of governance, such as EIP-1559 which introduced a fee burning mechanism to improve user experience. However, decentralized governance also brings challenges, such as community disagreements. The DAO incident in 2016 led to a hard fork of Ethereum, resulting in Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Additionally, the Ethereum Foundation holds certain influence over resource allocation, which may spark centralization controversies. Nevertheless, Ethereum's governance model is still considered one of the most open and transparent in the blockchain space, serving as a reference for other projects.