Why Voting Tokens Are F**king Horrible, And 4 Ways to Fix Them

There are two primary types of issues with coin voting that I worry about: (i) inequalities and incentive misalignments even in the absence of attackers, and (ii) outright attacks through various forms of (often obfuscated) vote buying.

DAOs work best when the governance burden related to curation, security, and risk can be reduced faster than the natural increase in coordination costs that accompanies the need to have members involved in voting on every decision made.

Token distribution mechanisms have adopted a lot of the structures from within the traditional financial world — including vesting schedules and vesting cliffs — which have resulted in some unintended consequences like adverse price action as tokens vest; and the inability of holders with large economic interests in a protocol to exercise governanc... See more

Decentralized governance in some contexts is both necessary and dangerous, for reasons that I will get into in this post. How can we get the benefits of DeGov while minimizing the risks? I will argue for one key part of the answer: we need to move beyond coin voting as it exists in its present form.