Lately I’ve been getting a little too fired up about DAO proposals—everyone calls it “incentive alignment,” but more often than not it’s just a reshuffling of power: who gets the voting power, who gets the subsidies, and who receives information first. The funniest part is that I thought I was being really careful, picking a chain with low fees to vote on. In the end, though, the proposal just “slipped in” an “executor reward + rebate whitelist” on the side—saving me a couple bucks of gas—and then I still ended up losing everything because of the rules…

Now it’s all kicking off again about miner/validator income, MEV, and fairness in transaction ordering. It’s normal that retail investors complain too: for the same transaction, once the queue order changes, who wins and who loses can be completely different. Basically, the more “neutral” a proposal is written, the more you have to look at who actually has the authority to press the button and who can cut in line. Anyway, I read proposals now by checking first: where the money is flowing, who permissions are being granted to, and whether the exit threshold is high or not—otherwise after I cast my vote, I might realize I’m just a background extra.