New Alliance Aims to Educate Lawmakers on Decentralized Ecosystem
Major Ethereum stakeholders have banded together to launch the Ethereum Protocol Advocacy Alliance, focused on coordinating policy efforts and educating lawmakers on the ecosystem. The Ethereum Protocol Advocacy Alliance (EPAA) was announced on Tuesday, with the EPAA emphasizing the importance of establishing the group to counter the apparent outsized influence that centralized crypto entities had in policymaking.
"This imbalance has often left the principles and technologies underpinning onchain infrastructure misunderstood or overlooked," said the EPAA.
The alliance comprises several prominent names in decentralized finance, including Aave Labs, Aragon, Curve, Lido Labs Foundation, Spark Foundation, The Graph Foundation, and the Uniswap Foundation.
"Together, we secure over $100 billion in assets through open, non-custodial protocols that operate without intermediaries. Drawing on our pragmatic and technical experience, we will advocate for onchain solutions to regulatory challenges."
The group also received the endorsement of the Ethereum Foundation, with co-executive director Tomasz K. Stańczak noting that the foundation supports this community-led coordination on advocacy.
Balancing Out Lobbying Efforts
The previous election cycle in the US saw the formation of crypto's largest Political Action Committee called Fairshake, founded by venture capital giant a16z, crypto exchange giant Coinbase, and XRP-ledger creators Ripple. The PAC amassed $260 million to support its lobbying efforts, spending a total of $195.8 million, according to data from OpenSecrets.
Given the stature of participants in the EPAA, it should have sufficient resources to throw its weight behind policy initiatives and try to shape policy.
The EPAA has outlined four ways it will engage with policymakers: contributing technical expertise, producing pragmatic resources to explain technical information, coordinating strategic engagement to expand the reach of messaging, and identifying areas of common technical interest.
Ethereum Continues to Grow
The Ethereum ecosystem has seen a host of new initiatives recently focused on improving in areas such as communication, branding, coordination, development, and onboarding. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Foundation revamped its grants program, opting for a more selective approach compared to its previous open application model. At the end of October, the foundation also launched institutions.ethereum.org, as part of a bid to smoothly onboard more institutions into Ethereum.