Moving beyond coin voting governance

Coin Voting allows token holders to participate in decision-making, but most token holders are not well-known (a result of attracting high-APY token holders). Decentralizing governance was delayed rather than building community. Despite the desire for decentralization (for regulatory, idealistic, or scaleable reasons), new alternatives have emerged... See more

Coin voting has three key problems: Those with more coins can influence things. Coins are freely traded, and bribery protocols like Paladin have appeared. The coin holder's level of involvement (context) is not considered when calculating the voting power for Coin Voting. Conversely, Coin Voting has some positives: Unlike one-member-one-vote, Coin ... See more

Most (if not all) governance mechanisms in crypto today revolve around some sort of implementation of the one-token-one-vote concept, akin to token-weighted direct democracy or shareholder democracy.

Governance rights face similar challenges with both fungible and non-fungible tokens: ownership naturally tends to have a power-law distribution so the question becomes: what do you do about whales? This recent essay by Vitalik paints a clear picture for why this will become an increasingly problematic issue for DAOs, both in terms of incentive mis... See more

It reduces plutocracy, whale attacks, and voter apathy. Furthermore, it accounts for skin-in-the-game, direct signaling and is relatively permissionless. By using tools like Conviction Voting, holders can increase their voting power. Due to a lack of top-down strategy setting, convergence is a challenge for many DAOs. As a final note, the above sys... See more

Decentralized governance is at the heart of the ideological foundation of crypto: equal participation for all actors. The playbook of progressive decentralization is being followed by more decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Users and tokenholders can now have more control over protocol parameters, treasury spending, and, in general, the industr... See more