From the beginning, CKB has been guided by a simple principle: a truly decentralized network should not depend on any single person, group, or organization to survive and thrive.
Blockchains are public infrastructure—open, permissionless systems designed to outlive the inventors, teams and companies that help bring them into existence. They evolve through the collective efforts of communities, adapting as new contributors, ideas, and technologies emerge. To reach their full potential, these systems require room to grow without unnecessary constraints.
Today, we take a deliberate step toward that vision.
Formation of the Common Knowledge Base Association
The Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA) is a Swiss Verein—a membership-based, non-profit legal entity registered in Baar, Switzerland.
It represents the natural evolution of the Nervos Foundation into a structure suited for a growing decentralized ecosystem. The Association brings together the teams and individuals who have spent the past eight years building CKB—researchers, engineers, storytellers, and operational personnel—into a single, more open, coordinated, and collaborative organization.
CKBA will assume stewardship of the ecosystem. Assets previously held by the Foundation are being transferred to this association through a structured process, ensuring continuity of funding for ongoing initiatives, grants, and ecosystem support programs.
This transition is designed to be seamless, preserving operational stability while aligning resource allocation more closely with rapidly evolving priorities.
Why Now?
As both the regulatory environment and CKB have matured, it has become clear that a traditional foundation structure is no longer the optimal coordination model.
A Swiss association provides a natural fit. As a membership-based structure, it enables broader participation by stakeholders across the ecosystem while creating a more effective coordination layer among technical development, ecosystem growth, and communication. At the same time, it offers a stable and widely recognized legal framework, grounded in regulatory clarity and political neutrality.
This change also unites core contributors who were previously separated into distinct entities with different mandates, management teams, and regulatory requirements. Coordination at the heart of the project is becoming tighter, ensuring that execution across functions is aligned.
Importantly, this change is not about introducing centralization but about improving coherence at the coordination layer—ensuring that research, development, and ecosystem efforts move in sync, while preserving the network’s decentralized nature.
Core Priorities
The Common Knowledge Base Association will focus on three primary areas:
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Awareness of CKB: Expanding global understanding of CKB through education, research, events, and narrative development.
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Developer Relations: Supporting developers building on CKB through documentation, technical education, and community engagement.
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Longevity: Ensuring a smooth transition toward a future in which a vibrant ecosystem operates increasingly autonomously
Governance Structure
The Association operates under Swiss association law, a well-established and politically neutral framework designed for membership-driven organizations.
Membership is structured in two tiers:
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General Members are community members who can participate and engage in Association meetings.
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Contributing Members are long-standing contributors to CKB and hold formal governance rights, including voting on key matters such as the election of the Board and the approval of major decisions affecting the Association.
The governance of the Association itself is organized around two primary bodies: the General Assembly and the Board.
The General Assembly is the highest governing body of the Association and consists of all Contributing Members. It is responsible for setting the Association’s overall direction and exercising ultimate oversight of its operations. This includes approving budgets, ratifying major strategic decisions, admitting new Contributing Members, and electing or removing Board members.
The Board serves as the supervisory body of the Association. It is elected by the General Assembly and is accountable to it. The Board is responsible for overseeing the Association’s strategy and ensuring that execution aligns with the priorities approved by the membership.
Day-to-day operations such as communications, software development and testing are conducted by various operational teams, coordinated by the Office of Association Operations, led by the Operations Director, a position appointed by and accountable to the Board.
This structure establishes a clear separation between strategic oversight and execution. Authority ultimately rests with Contributing Members (through the General Assembly); the Board is tasked with supervision and operational personnel focus on day-to-day execution toward board-decided goals.
In practice, this distributes decision-making power among active contributors, ensures leadership accountability, and creates a governance system that can evolve and scale with the ecosystem while remaining decentralized and transparent.
What Stays the Same
This transition does not change the fundamentals of CKB.
The mission, protocol, and tokenomics remain the same. Core contributors continue their work without interruption, and all ongoing initiatives are proceeding as planned.
This is a change in coordination structure—not in the project itself. Development continues on the same trajectory, now supported by a governance model designed to evolve alongside the ecosystem.
How to Get Involved
If you have been contributing to CKB as a developer, researcher, infrastructure operator, or community member, we encourage you to apply as a Contributing Member.
This is an opportunity to participate directly in the governance and direction of the ecosystem, at a time when the road to CKB’s future is being paved.
The membership portal will be available at https://ckba.build/, with full application details provided at launch.