Most DAOs are run by three groups: 1. core team/foundation 2. professional delegates 3. token whales Professional delegates exist because 1) most token holders ignore governance, 2) 95% of votes are "upgrade to v4.2.1," and 3) someone has to get paid to care. This setup was meant to prevent attacks like Compound's in 2024, where a whale bought tokens and voted to drain $24M in COMP tokens because only 57 addresses voted. No one cared to vote. This tri-alliance has multiple flaws from Vitalik mentioned vulnerability to capture and weakness to human politics. Compound itself is now basically run by Gauntlet. And you'll see same 'professional delegate' names across multiple DAOs as they collect payments from delegation rewards. I'm one of them! Not just for the fees, but it's giving me skin-in-the game. Not just yapping on X. But this model is dying. 1) DAOs are centralizing or stopping voting altogether since regulation pressure is gone and decentralized governance is just inefficient. 2) Delegate payments dried up. Businesses are shutting down. Vitalik's mentioned AI voting would be fun: delegate your tokens to an AI that knows your values. Votes happen automatically. More decentralization and less fatigue, so you really show up when controversial votes comes up. I also want to see more futarchy voting. It lets prediction markets decide. In this Gnosis vote, the market priced YES at 115 vs NO at 99, meaning GNO would pump 13% if the proposal passed. But it all works if project founders decide to care about DAOs at all. And I worry that many simply won't care.(Ignas | DeFi)