A lot of people from within the blockchain ecosystem is amazed by the DAO Governance model of Crypto Projects, given how DAO token holders could govern by voting project proposal, just by having their offline, non-custodial tokens available, without any central authority, in a distributed manner, ettc, etc
That’s amazing in theory as an infrastrutcture for community-led project, with a lot of transparency (decisions are public and publicly voted) and engagement.
Well… but here there’s a problem, the very same infrastructure enable private, unrestricted, control and takeover of any project that have an economic model, due to obvious entrepreneurship-led financial interests.
Wait, wasn’t the DAO been made for community-led project, where:
- Any governance proposal is posted on a project forum
- Any governance proposal is discussed among the community working to reach a consensus
- Any governance proposal is finally formalized on the DAO, available to be voted
- Any governance proposal is voted by the DAO token holders
Now… in a healthy community-led ecosystem the following things happens:
- All proposal are allowed to be posted on project forum, having a valuable content moderation leading to a constructive consensus building
- All comments to the proposals, counter-proposals, adjustment are discussed in a constructive and collaborative oriented way (For collaborative decision making, forum aren’t the best tool, but PolIs is)
- All proposal, only after beeing adjusted following a discussion and constructive contribution, is published for voting on DAO voting platform (es: Snapshot)
- Proposals get finally voted with a high % participation of Token Holders, where there are not small groups of Token Holders representing the majority of elegible voters (Dictatorship of Minorities effects)
However it seems that’s not the case for a lot DeFi formally DAO-governed project, where behind the public Twitter, Discord and Telegram communications channels of the project and its influencers, there’s a small circle of controls.
So, how Capitalistic control happens on DAO, with little or no-critics due to blockchain/web3 hype and histeria, where a group of few with non-transparent interests control the project while declaring community-lead:
- Only few proposals get into the forum without moderation
- Moderation of proposal’s comment is opinionated by the control group interests
- Only few proposal endup being placed for voting into the DAO and there’s no formal and accountable-way to decide what has to be voted on what not
- The total % of Token holders participation is low, and there are few large token holders voters that can take decisions regardless of the crowd (more people, with less tokens)
So, in a situation like this it’s obvious that DAO Token Holders are the capitalistic controllers of the project, being able to:
- Control the participatory process (who speak and when and how much outreach it get)
- Control the “democratic” process (what get voted)
- Control the decision process (own the majority trough capital/share control)
Given the obvious abusive manner a project can be capitalistically-controlled by a few, while blah-blahing about DeFi, Decentralization and Fuck The Venture Capital and Strike down the Central Banks, there’s a need to change something.
The way to change something is to introduce strong counter balance measures.
The measures has to be the following:
- Radical Transparency measure (similar to political democracy measures)
- Maximum individual Tokens Holders voting power
- Guarantees Statutary/Principles Measures and Process
More to follow, we need to bring Transparency to the DAO, in a way that can be independently verified/measured with strong accountability.
-naif
Eclecticism Now! 