The wider world · 74 / 86 · 2 min
DAOs and governance
A DAO is a group that says it decides by vote, often with a token. A vote cannot protect you from a treasury that moves before you notice, or from a vote you cannot afford to join.
A vote cannot protect you from a treasury that moves before you notice.
A worked case
A person buys a governance token and calls themselves an owner. A proposal they cannot outvote sends the treasury elsewhere. They had a vote in the way a single share is a vote. They did not have a lock on the money.
What a vote is
A proposal, a quorum, a result, and sometimes a delay before code runs. If there is no delay, the vote and the theft can be the same afternoon.
What it cannot protect
Token votes follow bags, not people. A large holder is the board. A forum post is not power.
Read who can move funds without a vote. That person is the real admin.
A vote you could not afford, and a treasury that moved
A DAO is a group that says it decides by vote, often with a token. ConstitutionDAO showed the romantic version: thousands of people, a treasury of ether, a bid on a copy of the US Constitution, a loss at the auction, and a messy argument about refunds. They did not own a government. They owned, briefly, a pool of money and a Discord. Spice DAO's book purchase showed the intellectual-property version of the same excitement.
Beanstalk showed the hostile version. A treasury governed by a token can be governed by whoever borrows the token. The vote was valid. The money left. The DAO course and the governance-attack course are the same object from two sides. One is the brochure. The other is the hole in it.
A token is not a lock. Read how fast a proposal executes. If the treasury can move inside the vote, the debate you wanted to join is theatre.
Read it yourself
These links are the record. They are not a recommendation, and they are not instructions. A news story or a court paper can still be wrong about a detail. The check does not change because a famous name is in the story.
Apply the check
Open a question. The line is about this topic. It is not a verdict that anything is safe.
Whoever the proposal pays.
Whoever can gather enough tokens.
The proposal, once it passes. Also an admin, if one can move funds without a vote.
Check yourself
Does holding a governance token give you an equal say?
No. Say follows the size of the bag, unless the rules say otherwise.
After this you can find whether funds can move without a vote, and whether a vote has a delay.