Decred is a decentralized, autonomous digital currency governed directly by its voting stakeholders. Stakeholders vote to decide on consensus rule changes, as well as matters of Treasury and policy. Decred is self-funded by a portion of the block reward.
Decred was born from its founders’ experiences with Bitcoin’s governance. Company 0 developed a Bitcoin full node implementation called btcsuite, but the software was not well received by the Bitcoin Core development team. With Bitcoin, the Core developers and Proof-of-Work miners are strong, centralized constituencies that can effectively veto changes to the consensus rules — other stakeholders in the Bitcoin ecosystem have minimal influence.