Over the past couple of days, I’ve been getting a bit carried away reading DAO proposals. On the surface, they say “optimize incentives,” but in reality, they’re just reshuffling who gets the power in the conversation. For example, the tighter voting power is tied to rewards, the more it feels like we’re training everyone to vote only for whichever side benefits them—plain and simple, turning governance into a predictable interest machine.

No wonder retail investors have been complaining lately about validator earnings, MEV, and ordering fairness. Those little details about who comes first on-chain ultimately get converted into “who has the advantage.” If a proposal happens to casually add something like “delegating to certain types of nodes is more cost-effective,” I get especially vigilant: is this about building public goods, or is it really just raising the bar?

One boring step I take for safety is to verify the proposal address and snapshot height offline before voting. I’d rather take ten more minutes than risk finding out one day that I signed something like “upgrade authorization to an unknown contract”… Anyway, I’m a person with obsessive-compulsive tendencies—slow is slow.