The problems with Democratic Governance The shortcomings of the prevailing governance methods in global political and corporate institutions are widely recognized within the blockchain community, leading to the emergence of decentralized autonomous organizations. It is commonly held that today's governance frameworks have failed to solve the problem of the commons and remain outdated in the face of rapid advancements in information technology, which hold great potential to improve organizational governance. Although the idea of DAOs was brought in to completely change how governance works, it has shown to have its own problems[2][3]. Some of these issues are surprisingly similar to the very governance methods it aims to replace. Even though DAOs hold more than 40 billion USD in value, they haven't been very successful in developing sophisticated systems for making decisions. The method they use for making decisions, which involves voting based on how many tokens a person has, seems to have flaws [5][8]. DAOs aim to embody democratic principles in governance, yet the application of democratic voting often results in centralization. A report from 2022 disclosed that fewer than 1% of all holders of DAO governance tokens wield 90% of the voting power. Additionally, DAO decision-making faces several challenges, including initial centralization of voting power, low voter turnout or apathy, a lack of transparency and accountability, and a misalignment between individual and institutional needs[9][10], among others. While various governance models seek to address these shortcomings, this article will focus on Futarchy. What is a Futarchy?

It's been almost exactly two weeks since my last update. In this period, I've taken a few more steps towards understanding the ethereum networking layer, and found an unexpected candidate for a project I'd love to work on. Let's dive in! Progress As I outlined in my previous update, my first week was spent reading random resources to get a general idea of the Ethereum protocol, and better pinpoint the areas where I would love to make contributions to. Of all I read, my favourite resource was the ethereum documentation. I especially enjoyed reading about the networking layer, and that led me down a path of reading about light-clients and the devp2p + libp2p specifications for execution and consensus clients. It was through this process that I found this, the first in a series of blog-posts that led me to Trin. I took a look at the issues and started a discussion on one that had the most appealing title, beginning a whirlwind of a journey into DHTs, networking specifications, 3 Rust codebases, and a lot of google-searches + notes-taking. That's what it took for me to even begin to understand the problem-definition & proposed solution in the first issue I decided to tackle in the eth ecosystem. A quick overview about the issue:

I'm Ademola, and I'll be joining the EPF in a permissionless manner. This document will outline my thought process and research made since I first found out about the fellowship and decided to participate a few days ago. Ethereum Research I knew I first had to learn specifics about the Ethereum protocol, and so I examined a few resources gotten from a combination of the kick-off call, the fellowship github repository, and some google searches. Those resources include: https://github.com/eth-protocol-fellows/cohort-four https://www.lucassaldanha.com/ (a cool collection of ethereum blog posts.) https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ A link to a youtube video explaining the Ethereum yellow paper. https://inevitableeth.com/site/content