Emergency Council

An emergency council is a small, specialized group of trusted individuals or entities granted the authority to execute critical, time-sensitive actions for a protocol. This is typically used to handle extreme security incidents where the normal, slow-moving governance process would be ineffective.

The council's power is usually strictly limited to specific functions, such as pausing contracts or upgrading security patches. Because this introduces a degree of centralization, the council members are often elected by the community and are subject to transparency requirements.

The existence of such a council is a compromise between pure decentralization and the practical necessity of rapid incident response. It is a key element of modern protocol risk management.