Governance and self-amendment
Tezos incorporates a built-in, on-chain mechanism for proposing, selecting, testing, and activating protocol upgrades without the need to hard fork. This mechanism makes Tezos a self-amending blockchain and allows any user to propose changes to the economic protocol, which defines the possible blockchain operations and how they are processed.
This self-amendment process is separate from the less formal Tezos Improvement Process.