Lately I’ve been a bit too into DAO voting. Put simply: many proposals look like they’re “tweaking parameters” on the surface, but underneath they’re really about rearranging who gets the rewards and who’s the one calling the shots. Especially the kind of drama where a new L1/L2 launches an incentive and TVL suddenly gets pulled up— I can totally empathize with veteran users who complain about “digging proposals, then selling,” because the vote passes and the short-term data looks great, but in the long run, who actually ends up staying… that part just feels kind of elusive.

I used to be a little too biased, always saying, “I only look at on-chain,” thinking that as long as you look at the data for transactions and votes, that’s enough. But then I realized: on-chain can only tell you where the money is flowing—it can’t tell you “why everyone suddenly lines up and speaks with one voice right now.” A lot of incentive design is basically pushing people to move in a certain direction. These days, I pay closer attention to the distribution of voting power in a proposal, the delegation relationships, and whether control will end up becoming even more concentrated after the incentives end. Anyway, I make fewer moves and vote more slowly—I’d rather miss a round of excitement than get swept up in it.