There is a phenomenon worth warning about: the annual salaries of three senior executives at a well-known DEX total $3.87 million, while the entire community receives only $10 million in grants. The numbers seem large, but when you do the math—comparing the foundation's costs for personnel versus the funds allocated for ecosystem development—the imbalance is clear.

Comparing this to another L2 project makes it even more striking. They manage a community fund of $63.5 million with a cost of only $2.13 million, achieving an incredibly high efficiency. Meanwhile, that DEX foundation's transparency is average at best, and its financial reports are vague.

What does this indicate? Many top-tier projects' massive funds are not truly flowing into ecosystem building and developer support. Instead, they are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the foundation and governance layers. Where is the promised decentralization? Now it has given rise to a new interest group, merely disguised as "community governance."

What should retail investors do? First, vote with your feet—watch out for projects with high governance token concentration and opaque foundation operations. Second, if you do hold relevant governance tokens, consider participating in voting and say no to those outrageous compensation schemes. Third, shift more attention to new ecosystems that genuinely allocate resources efficiently and are community-driven—they might be the future.

History tells us that the boy who slays the dragon often ends up becoming the evil dragon. True decentralization is not just a technical feature at the code level, but about who holds the power and benefits. If a few people make the decisions, it’s just decentralization in name only.