Seeing DAO voting proposals can be more exciting than watching candlestick charts... On the surface, it says “increase participation,” but when you get to the last line, you realize the incentives are only fed to a few fixed addresses—the rest of the people are just backdrop. To put it plainly, many proposals don’t really want to “become more decentralized”; they’re just redrawing the map of power—who can submit proposals, who can get subsidies, and who gets to decide how the rules get changed.

Lately, people have been talking again about social mining and fan tokens. “Attention is mining” sounds pretty trendy, but in the end it’s often still just that: voting power equals the right to allocate resources, and attention is only an entry point to bring in new users. Anyway, now whenever I see the four words “reward participation,” I get wary for three seconds: are they rewarding you, or are they really just rewarding that bit of votes behind you? For now, that’s it. Tomorrow I’ll flip through a few more proposals and keep complaining.