Recently, I’ve been watching governance votes for a few projects, and the more I look, the more it feels like I’m watching “which big whale’s mood is good today.” Everyone delegates their votes to so-called representatives—convenience, sure—but in the end it turns into a few people holding a pile of voting power who decide how proposals are written and where changes get made. In other words, they’re the ones calling the shots.

If small retail users want to participate, they get discouraged once by Gas, and then discouraged again by the process… As someone who’s allergic to transaction costs, would you really make me spend dozens of dollars just to cast a single vote? Forget it.

Even more awkward is that the community is still arguing about whether privacy coins/mixer coins count as “original sin.” Once the compliance boundaries get tighter, those big voter blocs in governance are even more likely to block the way with a single line—“for security.” So governance tokens, in the end, what are they really governing? It feels like they’re governing people like us: those who can’t be bothered to make a fuss and don’t have much voting power.

I’ll just watch for now.