I just reviewed a DAO proposal. On the surface it says “optimize incentives,” but on closer look it’s really just shifting voting power slightly toward a few resident addresses—like secretly sawing a chair’s legs down a little… If you don’t pay attention, you’ll end up sitting crooked. What’s most wild is the incentive design: they throw you candy, but the candy only goes to people willing to hand over their votes—in plain terms, it’s buying silence.

Recently, retail investors have been blasting validators for earning too much, MEV front-running, and unfair ordering. I can’t help but feel these proposals follow the same logic too: whoever gets in line first gets the allocation rights.

A while back, I ran into one of these as well. The proposal was written to be “too clever,” with parameters twisting and turning, and the on-chain liquidity still looked unstable. I chose to not understand it and just leave it alone, planning to check back in a couple of days. In the end, though, the community erupted…

Anyway, I’d rather not be the kind of greedy person who gets hit by that reflected light.