For the third time, I’ve seen people discussing the question of “who governance tokens actually govern.” To be honest, in the token models I’ve seen over the past few years, delegated voting keeps looking more and more like a joke. Big holders batch-delegate their votes to exchanges or market makers; those institutions then hold a few million votes and can just click yes and the proposal passes. Small retail holders’ votes amount to basically nothing—nobody cares. Sometimes they can’t even be bothered to read the proposal text and just follow the recommended flow. This isn’t governance; it’s “choosing a compliant caretaker.”

The issue of staking and unlocks has been brought up repeatedly lately, and I feel like it’s two sides of the same coin with governance hollowing out—locked votes get lent out to create nested, “Russian doll” loops, and when they unlock, it’s all anxiety about sell pressure. Put simply, governance tokens haven’t become tools of power; instead, they’ve turned into toys for big holders.

At this point, whenever project teams loudly call for “decentralized governance,” I instinctively want to check the delegation distribution. I don’t know if it’s just my imagination.