Recently, I’ve been looking at the delegation voting data of several protocols again, and the more I look, the more I feel: governance tokens are called “community governance,” but in reality, it’s more like “who can concentrate the votes, who makes the decisions.” Delegation was originally meant to save effort, but many people just hand their votes over to big accounts or institutions, and in the end, it becomes a workgroup of a few people making decisions, while the rest just click “like” under the forum posts.

I thought delegation could solve the problem of information asymmetry by handing it over to “more professional people,” but instead, it amplifies the asymmetry of power… To put it plainly, who does the token really govern? It might actually govern the participation sense of retail investors.

These days, I see everyone complaining about validator income, MEV, and fairness in ordering, and I can understand that frustration: even if the on-chain rules are written to be neutral, if the execution and ordering rights are highly concentrated, it feels like “you vote, I execute; you queue, I cut in line.” Anyway, I’m now more focused on the incentives structure behind upgrades/parameter changes. I vote too, but I no longer fantasize that one person, one vote, can naturally oppose oligarchic tendencies. That’s all for now.