The Web3 Foundation is trying to decentralize its way out of a job. 

The organization behind the Polkadot blockchain protocol is making strides to remove centralized decision making from its entire operation. Its teams in marketing, business development, grant funding and voting authority will be affected as the foundation advances active and decentralized governance of the protocol that’s outside its direct or indirect influence. 

“We are working to decentralize development and decision-making authority in our ecosystem across all functions – all the traditional initiatives that usually sit within one entity,”  David Hawig, director of ecosystem development at the Web3 Foundation said to me in an interview. “We want to decentralize all parts of the Polkadot ecosystem.”

Three flagship programs are part of a broader strategy to delegate or decentralize control and influence away from the Foundation – Decentralized Voices, which launched on February 6th, Decentralized Futures, and Thousand Validators. 

Hawig said these initiatives will encourage open participation by delegating funds and voting power between the community, as well as funding teams outside the foundation and bringing more independent validators into the Polkadot ecosystem. 

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Polkadot operates on a decentralized governance basis, meaning holders of its native DOT token vote for proposed changes to the protocol or spending of the on-chain treasury. 

“If you’re operating in this space and you have a decentralized protocol, there shouldn’t be a single marketing entity, a single implementer or a single foundation that controls everything,” he added. 

The foundation has announced funding for programs being created by marketing firm Distractive and Ideal Labs’ Encryption to the Future Protocol. 

“The idea is that we aren’t the ones influencing treasury decisions, or any kind of on-chain decisions, giving the community more voices and more power,” Hawig said. “In the long-term, this all gets funded via the on-chain treasury, so the community gets funding from the network itself.” 

The Web3 Foundation was founded by Ethereum Co-Founder Gavin Wood, who also created Polkadot. Wood learned the importance of having more than one client that runs blockchain software in the early days of Ethereum, which he carried into Polkadot. “If there was an issue with one implementation, the other could take over and it becomes more robust, diverse, and decentralized,” Hawig said. 

It’s hard to trust a protocol that’s maintained by a centralized entity, Hawig said. “Extending this decentralization to other fields is something that hasn’t been tried to this degree,” he said. “Ethereum has no marketing or business development entity. Polygon, Celestia and others mostly rely on single entities to take care of their social media accounts, branding or big flagship events.”

Polkadot wants to distinguish itself among its competitors with its client diversity, Hawig said. 

“Apart from Ethereum, very few protocols are working on different implementations of the core protocol,” he said. “Solana, for example, announced that they started to support the implementation of the core protocol in one different programming language by another team. Polkadot has, at this stage, two teams working on rust implementations, one team on Go-Implementation (Chainsafe), one team on the Java-Implementation (Limechain), and another on the CC+ Implementation (Quadrivium). The CC+ implementation is already used in production on Kusama.”  

lead image: David Hawig