Over the past couple of days, I’ve been getting a little carried away by DAO voting proposals. On the surface, they say “increase participation,” but only after you flip through the attachments do you realize the reward distribution and the openings for voting-power delegation have all been laid out. To put it plainly, the incentives aren’t asking you to come discuss—they’re asking you to pick a side: whoever can decide the reward rules can decide who counts as the “community.”

Around the time of the main chain upgrade/maintenance—before and after—everyone in the group is also speculating about whether the project will migrate. I don’t think whether it migrates or not is the important part; what matters is whether governance can stand up: whenever there’s uncertainty, they rush to cram power into a small number of multi-sig wallets, and in the end, voting is reduced to a ceremonial ritual. Anyway, when I look at proposals now, I first check where the money will flow and where the votes will be concentrated—love letters are written at the start, and the knives are in the footnotes.