This is a guest post by Mark Radcliffe, a partner at DLA Piper in Silicon Valley. Radcliffe is particularly involved in the legal issues raised by new technologies, such as blockchain, open source software, IoT and domain names.
Blockchain project governance is a widely discussed topic in the blockchain community. These governance discussions have focused primarily on the public “blockchain platforms” themselves, such as Ethereum. The most recent discussion started with an article by Fred Eshram
Blockchain Governance: Programming Our Future on November 27 2017 and is continuing with a series of articles on Medium by a variety of authors including
Vlad Zamfir and
Steven McKie. The Ethereum blockchain, itself, is undergoing a fundamental governance change by shifting its basic consensus mechanism (which determines which blocks are added to the Ethereum blockchain) from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.
However, a second level of blockchain governance has rarely been discussed: consortium project blockchain governance. Although some enterprise blockchain solutions will be run by a solution provider such as IBM running
Food Trust, many enterprise blockchain solutions will be implemented by a “consortium” of enterprises building one or more applications on top of a “blockchain platform”. The blockchain solutions provided by solution providers are generally run by the solution provider and may not have a formal governance structure. However, more traditional consortiums are already forming in many industries to deal with the particular problems of those industries: they include
B3i, and the
RiskBlock Alliance in the insurance industry and
we.trade and
Voltron in
trade finance.
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