I’ve been looking at the vote distribution for a few governance proposals again, and the more I look, the more it feels like I’m watching a “delegation network.” To put it plainly, a lot of people just delegate their votes with one click and then don’t bother with it anymore. In the end, is it the tokens that govern, or is it a small number of major addresses governing everyone’s sentiments…? I can understand that too. Voting is too much effort, and the benefits are invisible, so it’s easier to hand it over to “trusted contacts.”

But here’s the twist: once you run into situations like those around a major public chain upgrade or the period before and after a shutdown for maintenance, the community starts getting tense, speculating about whether the project will migrate. That’s when you realize that the people who truly have the power to make decisions in the governance channel have already been set in stone for a long time.

Anyway, these days I’m more willing to treat voting as a barometer of emotions: low participation plus concentrated delegation, and you basically shouldn’t expect “public opinion” to change anything in a meaningful way.