Over the past couple of days, I’ve gone through a few more DAO proposals, and the more I read them, the more I feel like the voting isn’t “democracy”—it’s more like distributing button permissions… Some people write the incentives really beautifully, but in practice they’re steering votes toward a few kinds of addresses (small details like delegation, vote mining, and voting thresholds). If you don’t look closely, you just end up assuming “yes.”

To put it plainly, the most valuable thing in a proposal isn’t the slogan—it’s who can continuously keep voting power, and who gets to define what’s “normal.”

It also made me think of what’s happening now when funding rates are extremely abnormal: in the group, whether people argue for reversing course or for continuing to drain the bubble, it’s actually the same as voting. The loudest voices are more likely to set the tone, but in the end, it’s the rules themselves that do the final settlement.

Anyway, whenever I see the words “incentives,” I immediately go looking for things like: where does the money come from, who it gets sent to, and after it’s sent, who becomes stronger.