S.1 Ep. 12 Lido’s Dual Governance: Balancing Delegates, stETH Holders, and DAO Maturity
In this episode of Governance Futures, hosts Jamilya and Eugene speak with Jen, DAO Comms Lead at Lido, about the launch of Lido’s dual governance model.<br>Jen shares her journey into governance, her perspective on decentralization, and how Lido is addressing value alignment between token holders and stETH users.<br>The conversation explores how dual governance gives stETH holders veto power, the role of delegate incentives, and the challenges of combining technical complexity with inclusive participation.<br>Jen also reflects on Vitalik’s call to “burn down” legitimacy, why governance should evolve instead, and how clarity matters more than total transparency.<br>The episode closes with a rapid-fire quiz, where Jen sums up the future of governance in one word: adaptability.<br>Some of the materials we mention in the episode:Dual Governance at Lido: https://x.com/TariQuin/status/1941154197870915950Vitalik recently said:https://youtu.be/pPZZ25qSprY?feature=shared&t=1590<br>Timestamps:00:00 – Cold Start<br>00:54 – Introduction and reflections on Lido governance<br>04:46 – Jen’s path into governance and joining Lido DAO<br>07:08 – Defining decentralization and Lido’s approach<br>10:11 – Times Square billboard and dual governance announcement<br>12:47 – Lido’s governance process before dual governance<br>14:34 – Delegate incentive program and oversight committee<br>18:18 – Governance as work: paying for delegate contributions<br>19:30 – Dual governance explained: stETH holders’ right to exit<br>23:27 – Safeguards, vetoes, and community alignment<br>25:08 – LDO vs. stETH holders: reactions to dual governance<br>29:12 – Governance expertise, DAO challenges, and delegate roles<br>31:53 – Why governance should serve the product, not dominate it<br>35:59 – Technical complexity and the need for education<br>40:24 – Committees, mandates, and decentralization trade-offs<br>43:39 – Balancing operations, transparency, and security<br>48:34 – The role of AI in governance clarity and summaries<br>52:12 – Legitimacy, Vitalik’s critique, and evolving governance<br>58:03 – Tokens, utility, and the uniqueness of DAOs<br>59:57 – Research priorities: defining the scope of DAO governance<br>01:05:46 – One-word quiz: decentralization, governance, adaptability
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Transcript
Governance is not the most important part. Project, product is the most important part. That's, like, my vision of the future. Governance is not the most important part.
This takes some balls. Honestly, this is very creative. Honestly, the first thing I saw it, I thought it was AI generated,
you know, just like for comms. I believe that we don't really need 100% transparency, but we need clarity. I hope that AI will resolve all all problems All the problems. Somewhere somewhere in the future, really.
Governance, hunger, energy, everything. Let the AI solve. Everything.
Yeah. Everything AI resolve, and we will just rest in some nice places.
How did you end up in this madness and chaos that we call governance? Hi, everyone. My name is Jamila.
And I'm Eugene.
And this is governance futures podcast where we discuss the past, present, and future of decentralized governance. And this week, we had amazing guest, Jen from Lido. She is Dowcom's lead. And, Eugene, what are your impressions right after having conversation with Jen? How do you feel?
Yeah. I really enjoyed the conversation. It was, of course, great getting to learn a little more about the dual governance model. I'm always fascinated in hearing from people what the actual experience is like just on a more personal level when it comes to going through these changes. Yeah. I mean, working in communities and decentralized communities, you never know what the experience is gonna be like. So I do appreciate Jen just sharing. And, yeah, it was really interesting to hear kind of the benefits that everyone seems to be seeing around the value alignment, incentive alignment, getting folks on the same page. So, yeah, I think it's just really exciting to see some of the bigger, you know, more long standing projects really mature, and kind of set new standards in that direction. So, yeah, I think it's really exciting to see what Lido has been up to in that sense. What about you, Jamila? What are some of your takeaways from the conversation?
I really enjoyed the conversation as well. To me, Joanne presented as a person who builds up on, you know, the progress and the fact that she mentioned that she was rather disappointed. That was my impression by Vitalik's quote that he kinda called to take away the legitimacy of existing governance structures in order to build something new. And, she strikes me as a person who prefers to just gradually build Yeah. One thing at a time on the things that we've spent so much time and effort and research on instead of just, like, abandoning it and trying to create a wheel. So, that, yeah, that approach, really inspires me because very often, we do get those moments of frustrations where I feel like, especially in web three where everything changes so fast and so quickly, we're just like, oh, you know what? Whatever. I'm just gonna scrap everything and start a new. But, her approach, I think, is more methodological. And, in my eyes, it was great to hear from her as a person who was so actively involved in recent governance changes at Lytle. And, yeah, she's just one person to talk to. And, this thing that they've pulled with putting the announcement, of the votes in Times Square was just something like, you know what? Hell yeah. Why not? So that was fun. I honestly totally missed that. I had no clue they did that until we were in the conversation.
But, yeah, no. I do appreciate what you also brought up there with you know, even when you do burn it all down and build anew, you're still building on your experience and everything that has happened. It is just a bit about how do we reframe it because the end goal is being in a different state. It's just about, you know, how aggressive in throwing everything out do you wanna be versus how incremental and growth oriented do you wanna be. But, yeah, it was definitely a super fun conversation. If you do enjoy the conversation, you should go ahead, like, subscribe, share with a friend. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions, comments, or wanna suggest guests for the future. And so, yeah, with that, go ahead and enjoy the conversation with Jen.
Hi, Jen. Thank you so much for coming to our podcast. Let me start by asking you just the first question. How did you end up in this madness and chaos that we call governance?
Hi. Hello, everyone. Hello, guys. Thank you for having me. First of all, regarding the question. Before we start, I will just know that, everything that I'm sharing today is, like, my personal opinion, not the legal advice, not the financial advice, and anything like that, and not the opinion of the whole lighter contributors or specifically lighter DAO decision. So that's all my personal how I'm approach things and how I'm dealing with the governance. And the question was how how that comes. I'm in the Web three governance. That's an interesting one. I think that's really connected to my personality because, I always been passionate about the tech industry and specifically the parts of tech industry which leads to the future, to change, to development and improvements. And I think that's that's just the place where I need to be some somewhere in a time. I started, I started my career, in fitness tech and work in SaaS for for quite a long time. But later, I decided that I want to go to the deeper tech industries. I was researching and working with different projects for a year over the AI and WebSury. And at the end of this story, I find out that my products and marketing and growth experience, communication experience fits really well into the lighter DAO communications part. And I started to contribute into the lighter DAO. I wanted to count how many years ago. It's already two and a half years. Yeah. I also like the governance because I believe that, there are need to be some some ways to govern things differently, not the corporate way, but more decentralized, more equal. And I I'm really inspired to be able to build it altogether with the other guys in, like, Leidos specifically, of course, and in the whole industry.
How do you guys approach decentralization at Lido? Or perhaps you could also share your personal vision of what centralization is to you. I'm gonna preface this by saying that usually we focus our episodes on what is the future, what is the present, the past of governance, where we headed. But most recently, we started to actually ask people question, how did they define decentralization? Because it's this relation is like the biggest buzzword of crypto ever, in my opinion. So it's very interesting because to every guest who comes to our podcast, it means something different. So first of all, may I ask you what is it to you? And, perhaps you could maybe give us some insight on how you approach it at Leidl.
Yep. Sure. Like, an easy answer would be that the centralization is the absent of sensor. Mhmm. The one. Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. Probably the most popular one. When we're talking about the Leida DAO and Leida contributors, I would say that almost everyone I meet during those two years really serious about making Ethereum more decentralized and really believe that, that's the only option to to do it right is to do it decentralized. And there were a lot of projects to support decentralization, to improve the the decentralization. One I wanted to mention is community staking module, in LIDAR, which actually really helps with decentralizing, validation, validation of Ethereum. We also have for those who are interested decentralization and decentralization approach, in lidar, we have the scorecard. I said that three years ago, the builders just, come all together and find out how the decentralization of the protocol might be improved and collected all those, items to be improved for the future. And during those three years, all item that were placed in the improvement needed here, section were moved to the good or okay status.
And the last part was actually dual governance with the decentralization of governance. We're gonna talk about, the dual governance, and I was about to actually ask you how did you feel because I saw in your ex you shared that this was one of the hardest things you had to work in web three. And, also, you guys, had, like, a humongous poster on Times Square announcing it. What was it? Could you could you explain a little bit?
Yeah. Actually, the poster was mostly a joke. Yep. I will start from the poster because, I'm joking that we're trendsetter because I've seen that some guys from safe started to do things like that. Initially, when team prepared the vote to release dual governance, they have, like, really, really, really long list of items moving to the vote, something around 55 or 57, something like that. And we were discussing, like, how actually it might be visible for those who will be voting, like, all this stuff. And someone told, like, we need a banner on some skyscraper. And I was like,
actually, we can afford it. What skyscrapers do we know? That's a good time. Square. Wow. I mean Yeah. Obviously, this takes some balls. Honestly, this is this is a very creative, but also, like like, honestly, the first thing I saw it, I thought it was AI generated, you know, just, like, for comms. I couldn't actually believe that you actually guys decided, you know what? Might as well just post it there. Why not?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We know. But but it's not it's not expensive. It's just, like, some people celebrate their birthday there on those, screens. So the hardest part was to make moderation, like, moderation team of those billboard to be sure that we're not promoting some financials, in their in their board. Yeah. And that was the hardest part. But, like, I I'm happy that you mentioned it because, I I personally mostly focusing during my work on the user experience and communications, informational design, all these stuff. And that was the part of, the release dual governance communications, which we wanted to be same time, clear from the technical perspective, inspiring for SD holders, like, celebration for the team because team have been working on it. They're yet working on it, but, like, for three years, if we will include the research part, and for year and a few months, if we're talking about the development. And, like, it's really hard to make it all at once.
It's crazy. For sure. Yeah. And I guess before we start on packing dual governance itself, can you in case folks aren't aware of what governance was like heading into dual governance and the updates that happened, what was governance like, say, the the months before that vote took place?
I yet think that Leiden governance is pretty simple and straightforward. We have clear process for any proposals, any proposal to become and to execute and change protocol. Overall, the processes you need to, prepare the post on research forum and proposal on research forum if you're not don't actually know how to, how to move from the idea to the proposal part, we have a team who will, like, Dow operations, who will assist you with the transforming proposal of your idea into proposal. Then, there would be the snapshot vote of chain vote, as a DAO preliminary agreement to invest into development of such thing. And then when the things are ready, after audits in preparation, we have on chain vote where LDO holders, which is LDO is the LIDA DAO governance token, vote on the proposal to execute it finally and change the protocol parameters, part of the protocol, or add something to you new like dual governance.
And can you add the role that delegates play in that, especially from, say, the lens of which delegates might actually be incentivized to get deeper in governance?
We have delegate incentivization program to incentivize delegates, and, like, our delegation yet open for everyone who are willing to participate. Our program is pretty simple. It started a year ago or some yeah. September. Really a year ago.
Yeah. Happy one year anniversary.
Yep. And we try to build something simple because we already we've seen how other DAOs estimating the contribution from delegates and how they organize, like, delegates' communications, delegates' participation, and we believe that the easiest it is, the better it works. Our main goal was to attract, high quality delegates from the industry with the different perspective. For example, the Anthony from Argonne is lighted out delegate. We have Polar, who are pretty famous in term in terms of the Ethereum culture. We have Paul Lansky. So we just wanted people with reputation participate as a delegates. We were able to, to attract some of them. And for being incentivized, the rules are straightforward. If you have 1,000,000 LDO delegated to you and you participate in discussions and votings, you will be incentivized. The idea was that we will have the delegate oversight committee, which consists from the people from contributors of flight.io and Agora, guys from Agora to make it like, make checking balances better here. Mhmm. In the accountability, we don't we try to avoid the situation when delegates accountable to the, contributors and contributors actually proposing something to change. So delegates need to vote for it because they are accountable to contributors. That's why we build those committee, and we believe that it's enough. And you don't need to, you don't need to count each forum post or each comment or each question because those delegates are able to contribute in the areas where they have expertise, where the their contribution are valued. That's more or less how it work. They are usually participate on the discussion phase on forum when it's something controversial or something that needed more clarification before voting. Some proposals in Leidah DAO are straightforward to fix something or to adjust parameters because of some changes, and there is no need of discussion. Yeah. But on the in the discussion where they needed their participating, they are also voting off chain and on chain. Provide reasoning, support, comms, in their personal account sometimes, which I'm really thankful.
Yeah. And so it sounds like the goal of the kind of incentive program that you put in place was to match the right people with the the right questions more so than, say, dealing with general passivity and governance or problems along those lines?
Yeah. When we proposed the incentivization program, one of the main ideas was that, to understand lighter protocol and lighter, proposals, you need to allocate some time. And if you need to allocate some some time, it's fair to be paid for it.
Yeah. Governance is work, so it's fair to recognize it as such. And so I guess jumping to get on a getting an understanding of the dual governance system that, went up for vote and got approved. Yeah. How do you when people ask you, what's dual governance? What what's your kind of summary answer there?
My favorite, would be, yeah, the the dual governance is ST holders holders' right to exit safely.
Mhmm.
Because I believe that, like, decentralized finance started from those right to exit. But if we're talking a bit more concrete here, dual governance is the mechanics which allowed SD holders to block LDO holders' decision if they want to. That's hard enough, so that's wouldn't end up in a situation when some SD holders just will be blocking LDO holders decisions just for fun. But if something like, there are some trust issue or security issue, they're able to defend themselves and defend their stake, first of all. So the idea is pretty simple. Right now, after the Elio on chain voting, the proposal moved to the dual governors before being executed. Mhmm. And as if holders have three days to come and say, like, we are against. And if, enough as if holders come and, like, say we are against those proposal, the governance would be blocked and nothing will be executed until the resolution. And there are a few ways of resolution. There are one way of resolution when LDO holders will talk with SD holders, will change their decision and they that just would be canceled, or SD holders who are just don't want to be the part of flight of protocol after, those changes happened. Just leave the protocol on there.
I'm curious, on the talking part. Who does this facilitation? Have you had any instances when it happens and you had to step in? Or who is responsible to facilitate for facilitating those two parties to come together and hopefully find some resolution?
Favorally say. I believe that the community will resolve it because, like, the situation when it might happen is, I hope, will never happen. But Okay. So you never had any instances. It's, it's just something that potentially might happen. And, yeah. Yeah. For sure. The idea is that when you have those rights to exit, it's, like, lower the probability of such thing happens because everyone knows that there are, possibility to oppose. That's that's the case. There are also, like, the idea that, in case of some, malicious attack to lie there, malicious sector need to keep in mind that they will have nothing because before they will be able to have what they want, all SDV just leave the protocol. That's, like, make it useless to attack. That's that's the case. And for LDIO holders, they also, right now, know that, if there are misalignment in between STF and LDIO, there need to be some resolution. There are also some committees to to discuss it, but I think that if some such situation will happen, it would be public debates and, like, yeah, probably delegates will be involved.
Right. But, forgive me, but I think in my understanding, it really has to come to very big contentious vote or something that would just divide the community, allowing some to leave, others to maybe to stay. What happens when, for example, just one one person, one community member, one delegate is not happy, then the only avenue they have is to, like, sell everything they have and say whatever.
Because Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's true. Yeah. That's true. That's that's yet not resolving, like, the majority minority problem.
Interesting. And so I guess to recap, when you introduce the dual governance model, the LDO governance side, kinda old model, it's not that that model changed. It's that another layer was added where STETH holders effectively got a veto, mechanism, so to say, or a way to approve or disapprove of the LDO governance decision. Is that a fair way to represent it, or were there any changes to the core governance of what was happening on the LDO side as well?
No. That's right to, like, right to say for SD holders, like, next layer, next step in the governance process.
And in general, do you see or have there been instances where you know that SD Eth holders kind of have incentive to get LDO to partake in that layer of governance? Or do they now so even more feel empowered of, oh, it doesn't matter whether or not we have LDO because we kind of get this second layer of approval?
I think that's, like, might be the case, for for some SD holders. But, I even I even seen the charts, like, how the address that holds LDO, how they interconnected with the addresses called STEV, and that's a lot a lot of holders, LDO holders, also hold STEV, which is actually obvious because they're think they they wanted to have a governance token, and they then they support the protocol, which govern governance token they have, so stake with lighter, which make a lot of sense to me. But, overall, I think that, right now for STF holders, there are no reason to buy LDO to participate in governance if they don't want go deeper to if they don't have some specific ideas. Now STF holders are defended from any unpredicted silent changes.
And so I guess, another element of the question is what was the experience of getting it passed like? Because this is a pretty big introduction into the system. How did the LDO holder community react? How did the STETH holder community react? Was it generally seen as great this is positive some were aligning our incentives? Or were there, you know, inevitably some kind of conflicts or, disagreements about how this would affect the system?
That's actually why I'm usually explain, like, really proactive step for, Light It Out because I believe that Light It Out governance community are really value aligned. We have lighted our vote where the mission, vision, and, value stated, and it was voted by LDO holders. We had a quorum there. And governance participants, over all this time, were really consistent in supporting decentralization, staking simplicity, and all those value that we have in those vault. And dual governance actually was the part of the deliverables which were aligned with values. It's good for Ethereum. It's good for, decentralization, and there were no comments from the LDO holders or no tension in between STF holders and LDO holders. I even may say that SD holders even more passive than LDO holders because this is just they're just users of the product. They don't really want to participate in governance usually. So I hope during the time, we will see that dual governance valued from the user's side, but it's live only for, like, months or maybe two months right now. So it's too early to say that, I don't know, that it pushed amount of stake in Leiden. But I hope that later, it would be the, plus few points to stake with Leida.
Yeah. We'll have to bring you on again next year to see how when we're at the one year anniversary of dual governance, how how that's going in retrospect. But, yeah, I mean, it's it's really interesting to to hear about how this kinda worked out and is helping with that, kind of value alignment and incentive alignment. And I think so many, you know, DAOs struggle in different ways and feeling that all of the relevant stakeholders are represented in governance. And, I mean, do you feel and has the sentiment been that all of the different people around the ecosystem kind of are really feeling that, you know, this this is the thing that's getting us all on the same page more so. It sounds like it is a step in that direction, if not, a major move there.
Yes. I think so. Like, at least active part Mhmm. Of the LDO holders were, like, supported, supported the most to build the strong background for the protocol. And
future growth. And I guess for a moment of, you know, zooming away from Leidos specifically and just thinking about the state of governance generally in the space, You know, I I think I know a lot of, say, l twos are struggling with, oh, well, you have this governance participation community, and a lot of them are more professionalizing as governance experts, so to say, or, you know, professional delegates. But I know for us currently, a big problem on our mind is, like, how do we actually get the the groups building in our ecosystem active in governance? Like, how do we get these other active stakeholders in governance? And I guess, what's your general view on kind of dual governance models as a stepping stone towards general value alignment for other ecosystems? Or do you think that there's something unique about Lido where it can work really well there but might not port well to say l two governance or other areas?
That's an interesting question. I believe that when you're talking about the professional delegates and the governance experts, I think the first problem is on that level. First of all, we, as a community, who are developing the Web three governance, need to understand, what actually those governance expertise are. Because, from my point of view, each project need its own set of experts that need to be presented. And governance expertise is just, like, small parts. If we're thinking about the, how the systems evolve, the governance need to be that tiny so no one just no one noticing that governance is here. That's, like, my vision of the future, because, like, governance is not the most important part. Project product is the most important part. Governance is not the most important part?
No. No. No. But I I agree. I liked your example of it's it shouldn't felt like it's there, but it should make your life easier. It it's something essential, at least to me, I think. But it should not be I don't know. It should
as it is right now. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That that's that's actually, from my point of view, the issue. And, if you have a lot of governance experts, they will want to talk about governance, not about users, not about projects, not about product, but about the governance. And it will never finished if you like, the main part of your, decision makers or even discussion participants are wanna talk about governance, not about the market, product, users, needs, whatever. And I don't think that the something like dual governance is the resolution of this problem. But I think that as the community, we first need to understand how to, how to form governance process to have those experts participating, in the dual governance or any other tools to align users' incentives with, governance participants' incentives. It's just tech other, like, other things which also need to be designed. I'm not sure that everyone need it. I'd say that the protocols which, holds millions of users' funds need to have something like that, some way to align users' risks with the decision making makers' risks. That's actually, like, not the news. Like, corporate governance also work in this way and trying to resolve those problem for for quite a long time. But yeah. But to clarify, you're not saying that governance is not important. Is that it should be separate,
from, you know, when it comes to discussions about market fit, ecosystem growth, whatever that might be. So it shouldn't be just the whole center of every discussion. Because Yeah. I feel like in our space, sometimes governance is kind of like disregarded by some of the builders as not important or and I personally try to make a point that it is very important. But I actually agree with you that it is important so much that we should actually have it designed, but in a way that actually it's like air. You know? You breathe it every day. It's a session for you, but you don't necessarily see it. If you do, it's something something is off.
Exactly. Exactly. It's really important. And the, like, wrong builded governance leads to the enorm enormous amount of problems Mhmm. And issues and challenges. And the current actually, all current challenges we're faced with is because of the, we're just experimenting on the governance design. But long term, I believe that we need to go to those, like, tiny governance which will serve the project Mhmm. It governed. And the professional delegates with their governance expertise doesn't make me feel that they are on the same page with me because they are usually, wanted to talk about governance more, not proposing, like, solution solutions for, make it make make the decisions more informed or change the frameworks to make decisions faster, better, involve some experts which needed and missed right now in the protocols.
That's so, like, governance for the sake of governance is is where we would run into a dead end. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. There's definitely no shortage of governance theater in the space, so that, that view makes sense. And I guess, you know, I think another thing that really sets apart LIDO governance, from others is sort of the need of the technical understanding. Because I think in a lot of environments, like, I I'm not a, you know, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a computer scientist. I would feel comfortable stepping into most governance environments. But then when I looked at Leidos, it said, woah. I'm gonna need to do a lot of homework before I could possibly step into here. And so, yeah, I I guess as part of, you know, when you're seeing the both the selection of delegates and who you invite and who that kinda can bring in, What do you see as both the positives and negatives of that kind of requirement, so to say, and recognizing it's not a literal, you know, mandated thing as much as we're just a complex protocol and you need to understand it if you wanna be part of governance.
That's that's a hard one for me because, I'm also not an engineer, and I needed to learn a lot to understand, to understand on chain governance and lidar. And I believe that, like, technical expertise highly needed, but it might be designed better than it is designed right now in Leidah. Leidah's specific, is that literally no changes to protocol might pass by any other way except the, on chain voting. Mhmm. We can also, like, easy track, but the no big releases or something like that might go to the easy track. Easy track is just optimistic governance yet accountable to the LDO holders for some operational things, which are just repeated quite often, and we just don't want to burn out, community with the execution of those, operations. We did a lot of work, specifically, the team which calls DOW operations team and DOW infrastructure team to make it easier to understand technical part. Guys preparing the guides to validate each on chain proposal, trying to explain every part of, each vote, but yet it's too hard for for big parts of audience. It's too hard. It's too technical. Probably best way would be if we have some some technical experts who will validate, but it's much less decentralized, same time. So you need to make some trade offs. We made those trade off that we will try to educate everyone. We will try to to make people feel comfortable to vote on the technical proposals because there are, few auditors, respectful auditors who audit it and say that those code actually do what, what was decided to what what was decided before. The transparency level with the possibility to check everything, to understand what each line in the vote means. Also, just, first of all, make people feel that we're we are not trying to hide anything. Mhmm. Yeah. So I don't have, like, the right answer how it need to be to be designed. But the way, it done in lighter is keep decentralization, keep all your holders with their responsibilities to, make decisions and then execute them. And the infrastructure team, which are trying to make it easier to educate on the changes on the protocol on everything.
And I guess a clarifying question also with the structure around Lido, how much you know, when you say infrastructure team or different teams, how many of the teams came into existence at the time of governance existing versus has governance approved kind of every team or committee, and kinda what is the process, look like on that side in in Lido governance?
Usually, like, there are different processes. The main process is the granting process to the, Lidl Labs Foundation. We have, like, a few foundations, Lidl Labs, Lidl Ecosystem, and Lidl Alliance right now. And, they were providing, them grants to, to maintain the protocol, to upgrade the protocol, to deliver on the goals which were set by the DAO. And that's the one part of it. In like, token holders in DAO never asking how the teams inside foundation structured. Like, it might be one big team. Actually, the we're we're pretty decentralized in the team structure changing. Some people leaving. Some people started to contribute. Some like like, that's chaotic,
really. Yeah. But Would it be web three without the chaos?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if we're talking about the committees and any, mandate from the DAO to the committee to do something for the DAO, it's also each time need the DAO white vote to, to, like, have those mandate for those committee. And committee, all of them are public. They have participants, from the LIDAR core contributors and usually from some other, protocols, projects somewhere else because, we believe that if it's a mandate to only one party connected anyhow, it's not really a good decentralization. And the commitment to to keep the level of decentralization as high as it possible to operate with make us, organizing this way.
Yeah. That's really interesting. And, you know, it seems like you're saying, like, this balance, there's almost a consistent balancing act that needs to happen between the decentralization, certain elements of the operations. And I know from the previous question, you're mentioning something like transparency, or security or these other kind of, you know, important questions that, just look different when they're in fundamentally the, how, both the the, yeah, the DAO and the foundation team kinda thinks about these.
It's changing. Like, it's always changing because, the any project need to react on the worlds outside the project, and the market itself, like, Ethereum itself changing a lot right now. I wouldn't ask her for the, for the DAO because DAO have never had a vote, you know, like, how to place those dots in between all all those things. I also believe that inside the contributors group, it would be really high, hard to align, on how we feel about this because, we have, like, community staking team, which will be, like, 100% transparent, 100% open, something like this. We have, like, other teams who will be a bit more conservative in trying to place it somewhere in the middle. I personally when we're talking about transparency, keeping in mind all my web three experience with the governance and all my previous experience, I believe that we don't really need 100% transparency, but we need clarity. We need people, who we need to make it possible for people who need some information to get those information. Lidr analytics work stream, actually do the great work here, providing a lot of dashboards to explain, Lidr core metrics. Steakhouse providing, like, on chain Dune reports on the lighter financials, and you actually really can check the protocol spendings for for for the whole time of lighter protocol works deployed. So, I think that next step would be to make it easier to understand all those data. We are surrounded.
So is it the problem that there's just so much information that people can't even figure it out themselves where to look at if they need some quick stats data? Or is it it's just so much of it, but it's also so complicated that we need to focus on how do we disseminate that information, or how do we make it more digestible for ordinary users who don't need to go through all of the documents. They just need to look, for answer for one particular question.
Yeah. I I I I think that's more more the second option. Mhmm. I personally really struggling really struggling with, like, choose between neutrality and some context over the data we have. And if you wanna be neutral, the information you pro like, provide feels useless because, like, it's just data that's hard to interpret it. Even with some, like, some additional data in it when no one comment on the on the sense, why is it happening, what the context behind, how actually you when you build those dashboards, what was the use cases to use it? What was the idea? Why who and why will need it? And information are complex. Same time, there are a lot of data. Same time, there are a lot of misinterpretation of those data that are visible for everyone. And whenever you try to make it more clear, you're just do the news news cycle of misinterpreting the information. So that's really, really hard area. But I believe that, first, we need to to learn how to explain clearly explain the basics, and then we would be able to learn how to add more context on top of those basics.
And I guess as part of, you know, whatever a future solution will be in that realm, how how do you see the role of AI there? I feel like that's an unavoidable question these days.
Yep. I hope I hope that AI will resolve, all all problems All the problems. Somewhere
in the future, really. Governance, hunger, energy, everything. You let the AI solve it. Everything. Yeah.
Everything, yeah, AI resolve, and we will just rest in some nice places. I've seen a lot of projects which are summarizing proposals in trying to explain, changes, in protocols. The problem here that there are no users for touch projects. No. And there are some delegates who are using it. Of course, there are some people who are using it, but it's much more projects than users. Yeah. That's what I see right now. Too many AI service providers
to little of number of people who are actually using it. Is that comes from your Yeah. Practical observations that you see too many projects, but there's just not enough users?
Yeah. And I'm not sure that the reason why they run not a lot of users is because the absence of clarity of the information because they're providing, like, some summaries, make it shorter. I don't know. I think that AI might help with discussions. I think AI might help with some validation against, really clear, really clear clears for example, to, like, AI, I don't believe that I will be able to validate if the project or proposal are fit into the core value which were stated. But I believe if you have, like, the KPIs, KPI system, AI will be able to check that the based on the Dune dashboards that it's reached all goods by the token.
Do you use any AI tools at Lyto?
I use, like, basics, cloud, chat GPT. I also use, how did it call, chat chat p d r for product require requirement docs, because I'm also working with the interfaces and need to provide some p PRDs for for devs. We all actually, our team is a big fan of, Google notebook. Did you know their LLM which are you can just download their information, and the notebook will use only the information which you downloaded here. We build one tool, for internal use to check what was the proposal, like, what was the process that Dow voted to check if we're not if was it like a local copy that is un okay. That's cool. Yeah. Like, we'll really really recommend you to try. Nice. Probably, like, like, different teams use different tools. That's what I need for communications. I believe that's other guys using the other stuff.
I meant more like me be within the towers, something like an AI enabled dashboard, whatever. No. Okay. Cool. Not yet.
Just just real human building dashboards.
Yeah. Leaving that work to the humans for now before the AI solve everything. But I I did also wanna jump a little bit towards the the topic of legitimacy, and specifically kinda jump to a quote that Vitalik recently mentioned where step one burned down the legitimacy of the existing paradigm. I guess using that as a jumping off point kind of yeah. What do you think of that approach, and what is your general view? I know we've touched on it a little bit with some of the decentralization theater. But, yeah, like, what what's your view on, that kind of approach of burning down how we think about governance these days?
I believe that, like, burn down everything you have after ten years, instead of evolving it, not the right way to behave. That's, like, my pretty straightforward transfer. Because, actually, when I started to contribute to the LIDAR, I tried to, like it was usual start. No job description. No goals. Nothing. Just please solve this All our issues. Fix current. Please solve something. Yeah. And the legitimacy was the one thing, we discussed quite a lot with, guys inside. And from one point of view, I don't believe, like, Vitalik itself himself can just say, like, those are not legit anymore because legitimacy aren't from people, from community, not from one person. But same time,
unless it's a authoritarian state
yeah. Yeah. But, thankfully, we are talking about the theorem. But same time, it's really sad to me to hear that, that someone think that all those experiments, all those, tools, all those approaches, all those frameworks which were, developed by the community, is kinda useless. I believe it's not. I believe that we just need to evolve what we have. We can't jump out of the paradigm with it into some other paradigm. And referring to the those metallic talk, he actually not proposed And you said something, like, completely new here. He proposed some paradigm where, which are really close to the current one. The problems in the current one is that reality and capitalism works a bit differently than, that than Pank's expected. So I don't really feel that the way he proposed will somehow work better with same problems. So, yeah, I believe that we don't need to burn everything out. We need to evolve.
I feel like that brings up a really interesting point around how many of these challenges are due to some kind of systematic challenge that we're not addressing correctly, or are they actually coming down to different expectations as you're kind of alluding to? And we're all pretending that, you know, like, decentralization solves everything full stop when, you know, it solves specific problems, and, you know, it's not having enough nuance. And so I guess in maybe a specific direction to take that question is around the role that tokens actually play in our ecosystems. And, you know, are they meant to be representative of some kind of utility function? Are they meant to be representative of ownership or responsibility or other things? And the fact that we don't actually have that shared understanding could be leading to some more of these issues. Yeah. I guess what what's your kind of reaction to to that general line thinking?
This path is, like, each DAO are unique. So that's actually expected that tokens also would like, tokens functions will be unique. And, yep, you're right that, governance token, not ownership tokens. Not all of them have utility. Should we do something with that right now? I don't think so. I believe that for the future, of governance and for the future builders, it would be really nice to think about the, system design before they started and find out the specific tokens model, or or token model for specific projects. But same time, that's not the answer. That's just one part of the system. Tokens can't resolve everything. You yet need to be able to work with check and balances, with principal agent problem, with oligopoly, with the capitalism, and the problem that decentralization actually, killed the effectiveness. That's like nothing token can do about that. But maybe when you just design keeping all this in mind, you will be able to come up with, some better token model that than existing one.
Yeah. So unlike the potential of AI, tokens cannot solve all problems and need to be much more specific to the actual design of your system.
But it's also I feel like it's the question towards that uniqueness. I feel like, generally, there's a trend that even when it comes to constitutions or, like, you know, terms of use of the website, whatever, we just see projects copying it from whoever is leading that area, DeFi, whatnot. And very often, I would just see the same, the same policies written just like the project name changed. And maybe very similar, feeling I have when I see, yeah, projects of replicating someone's governance or someone's token design just because they saw someone doing it and that working for that other project. So I think it's very important that you brought this point that it's there's just not one universal governance that there's no universal token that would be completely, like, just the standard for all the DAOs. They're all very unique and different, and we should we should keep that in mind.
Yeah. And I guess as we and I know we're getting towards the tail end of our time together, and we'll have to switch to the last segment soon. But I did wanna ask kind of one more question with that in mind. You know, again, thinking broadly towards the future of governance. You know, if if you got to decide what are some experiments happening in the next year, whether in Lido or other ecosystems, what kind of research you wanna see happening more of, What do you see as, you know, some of the topics that are most important for us to kinda solve some of these questions and get closer towards just better functioning government systems?
Sure. Transfer would be how to define the scope for the DAO, because I think that the scope is the key. What need to be governed, how to build, how to design the system that keep the whole system accountable to the Dao, but same time, which scope need to be 100% sure decided by the holdout vote. And what can be delegated to who? Maybe to some experts group. Maybe to some, I don't know, some projects, maybe to, contributors who are deeply involved in the current state of the projects. And I think that the if we will be able to find the framework to scope governance right, we will be able to find, the frameworks to make it faster, to make it, to make decisions more informed, like, everything. Scope solves a lot of, like, a lot of obstacles for me. But that's hard because the scope are actually connected with with regulations, with expertise, with specific products, which are builded. So that's hard, but I if if I'm choose the one direction to investigate, it would be how what is the approach to figure out, the scope of governance decisions.
Yeah. I really love that you went in that direction. And because I feel like, especially, it speaks to, one of the core problems, or at least in in my personal view of one of the core problems of web three and the way we've been going about governance, which is that, like, we want this DAO to exist because, you know, decentralization. And, like, the scope of labs isn't always fully set. The scope of the foundation is reactive to labs, which both of those aren't always fully set. And then you just add a third organization because why not? And now you have kind of three organizations which might not have clear scope, might not have clarity of mission, vision, values. You know, I literally wrote down on a post that I'm like, oh, thing to research. How many DAOs have actually voted on and approved their mission, vision, values? Because how can you actually scope the DAO if you never even had that conversation? So I I really appreciate you highlighting the importance of that direction. And I think, you know, we're seeing obviously a lot of change, you know, a 16 z's whole this is the end of the foundation era view now, and will that make it easier to have the right scope? I I actually don't know that that will inherently make it easier. And it looks like I see you shaking your head as well. I don't know if you wanna comment on that.
Yeah. Yeah. I I believe that, before we actually have a conversation, with a lot of stakeholders, we wouldn't be able to understand the right scope. And same time, we need to, like, there are some advantages we already have. We have a lot of DAOs with different scopes, and we can actually analyze how is it going for them. Is that, like, enough level of decentralization in their as it is scope there. For example, like, in Leida, we are I'd say that on the right side of of the scale of the decentralization, literally, every decisions are going through the DAO. But it's a new really unusual. And it it also has some disadvantages. So, yeah, this research might helps future of the Dallas and governance.
Thank you so much. It's been super interesting. At times, I also felt like, oh, yes. Somebody understands and shares the pain. Now to our favorite part of Mhmm. Our podcast, well, my favorite part, is we're gonna ask you some questions, and we'll ask you to just give us one word as an answer. So, a sketched sum and take your time to sing. It's absolutely fine. We don't expect you to just know the answer right away. First one, how would you describe culture at Leidl in one word? Might it be decentralization? Right. That's decentralization. K. One thing in governance that you think should cease to exist in the next couple of years.
Hard one.
Something that you would just cancel right away or wouldn't want wouldn't wanna see anymore in the next couple of years? Really heard one.
A lot of such things. How did she want? Surely. I'm joking. I'm joking. I have governance and sake of governance, but I'm not sure that this is be one word. Maybe in Germany, it might be one word.
Everything's somehow one word in German.
So we would just say, yeah, governance for the sake of it. Right? Yep. Okay. What inspired you to carry on with your work, your life? Also one word. I know. Future. Nice. And the last but not the least, our signature question, what is the future of governance in one word? Adaptability.
Mhmm. I like it. And just I I just thought adaptability and think, like, you already have Anthony from Oregon, and maybe he also choose adaptability because they're building exactly this one.
It's okay. I I think every guest has very unique and, most of the times, really unexpected answers. So thank you so much, Jen, for your time, for coming to our podcast. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you for having me, guys. Thanks for tuning in. The Governance Futures podcast is sponsored by the Scroll Foundation and produced by the governance team at the foundation, Jamila Kamalova and Eugene Leventhal. Any music and photos are attested in the episode description. Feel free to subscribe, leave a review, or share with a friend. Until next time.
