I just finished translating a governance proposal for a delegated voting. The more I read, the more interesting it feels. On the surface, it talks about decentralization, but in reality a whole bunch of votes are whales delegating to the protocol or having institutions vote on their behalf—basically, it’s just changing the costume while continuing to entrench oligarchy. Whom does the governance token actually govern? I honestly haven’t seen many retail users really be able to participate in decision-making; what I do see is big players and project teams keeping to themselves and building their own little empires.

Recently, the community has been aggressively arguing over the compliance boundaries for privacy coins and mixers. But what I see beneath that is also a governance issue: who decides what can be put on-chain and what doesn’t count as “compliant”? It’s still those who hold large amounts of delegated votes who get to call the shots.

What I learned wasn’t any technique—it was to calm down and figure out who’s actually playing this game and who’s setting the rules.