Last night, I was browsing on-chain governance votes, and the more I looked, the more it felt like watching a “delegate ranking competition.” A bunch of people just cast their votes to a few familiar faces, and the reasons were very real: it’s convenient, they’re afraid of missing out, and anyway my little pile of tokens can’t change anything. In the end, governance tokens are nominally owned by everyone, but in practice, the people who can truly make decisions are becoming more and more oligarch-like. No matter how beautifully the proposals are written, it still comes down to who has (or has been delegated) the most votes.

The recent NFT royalty dispute has a similar taste too: creators say they want income, the market says it wants liquidity, and ultimately, what’s really going on at the negotiation table is a tug-of-war between the platform, top projects, and big players—ordinary people are more often the side that gets notified about “voting” or “rule updates.” Put plainly, in many cases, governance doesn’t really govern the “community”; it governs your mindset—making you feel like you’re participating, while you’re simply handing over power more smoothly.

Right now, I’m pretty timid: if I can vote myself, I’ll vote myself; if I don’t understand, I won’t vote—at least I shouldn’t blindly delegate everything to big accounts as a hands-off manager. What I’ve learned isn’t techniques, but this: as for so-called governance, first look at how power is concentrated, and then decide whether you want to be that convenient accelerator.