Just finished translating a governance proposal for a protocol, and I’m genuinely moved. On the surface, it’s the community’s vote determining how the treasury funds should be used, but when you look closer, the weight allocation, delegation mechanisms, and even the proposal thresholds—plainly speaking—mean the power structure has already been effectively set in stone at the code level. Some big-name accounts can cast one vote that equals my ten votes, but are their interests really the same as someone like me, a small retail holder? Either way, whenever I see proposals like this, I’ll first pull up a chart showing the distribution of voting addresses, to see whether the top ten wallets are all clustered in the same ecosystem.

As rate-cut expectations rise and fall, and the U.S. dollar and risk assets move up and down together, I actually feel even more that these underlying power games are worth studying—where the honey is, the hummingbirds naturally know where to fly. For now, I’ll go through the audit report for another protocol to see whether there’s anything fishy hidden in it.