S.1 Ep.7 DAO Governance in Practice: Aragon and Beyond with CEO Anthony Leutenegger
In this episode of Governance Futures, Eugene and Jamilya speak with Anthony Leutenegger, CEO of Aragon, about tooling, regulation and DAO governance today. We dig into why ownership and control matter more than vague notions of decentralization, and how design choices like Aragon OSx are reshaping the way DAOs govern themselves. We also explore lessons from experiments like Lido’s dual governance, the impact of emerging regulation such as the Clarity Act, and what it could mean if decentralized ownership becomes a legal requirement. In this conversation we also discuss the role of modular systems, incentives, and AI agents in shaping the next generation of governance. This episode is for those questioning what real decentralization means, and how governance in Web3 must evolve to balance founder control, community power, and legal clarity. Some of the materials we mention in the episode:- Aragon documentation: https://docs.aragon.org/- The Growth Engine: How veLockers & Gauges Drive Value Accrual: https://blog.aragon.org/the-growth-engine-how-velockers-gauges-drive-value-accrual/- Aragon OSx: https://docs.aragon.org/osx-contracts/1.x/index.html#the_aragon_osx_dao_framework- Anthony's talk at ETH Prague 2025 "Ownership and Governance always needs the right Incentives": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAIA625hLR0Listen to this and more episodes on all platforms: Apple : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gov-futures-trailer/id1823028614?i=1000714675608Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/show/6QRkrWmq21Z66jRJtN2UIuFollow us on X: https://x.com/gov_futuresTime-stamps:00:00 Intro 01:02 Introduction to Governance Futures Podcast 02:39 The Importance of Human-Centered Governance 03:57 Rebuilding Aragon: The Need for Modular Governance 04:18 The Evolution of DAOs and Governance Models 09:57 Decentralization: A Spectrum of Control 12:13 Aragon's Mission and Governance Infrastructure 14:08 Decentralization: Leadership vs. Control 18:39 Challenges of Multisig and On-Chain Governance 21:55 The Role of DAOs as Executors 23:22 Reframing DAOs and Governance Structures 24:48 The Evolution of Aragon and Its Vision 26:29 Introducing Aragon OS X: A Modular Governance Framework 30:03 Dual Governance: Aligning Interests in DAOs 36:05 Regulatory Impact on Governance 43:59 Proactive Governance in a Changing Regulatory Landscape 46:04 Building Adaptive Organizations 47:52 Core Principles of Successful Governance 49:13 Aligning Incentives for Token Holders 51:37 The Role of Trust in Governance 53:00 AI's Impact on Future Governance 57:15 Understanding Gauges in Tokenomics 01:01:06 Challenges in Modular Governance Adoption 01:04:26 Quiz Segment 01:05:32 Outro
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Transcript
DAOs, despite really being built on unstoppable infrastructure,
were really still struggling to accomplish their own goals. You know, Donald Trump, I knew the second it happened, he launched his meme coin. I knew all bets were off. We all like to call crime season now where there's no attempt anymore to even pretend. The original DAOs, the main difference between them and some of the others is they actually were really rooted in true decentralization and on chain control actually being passed off to the token holders. The existing stacks and solution were not capable of meeting the needs of on chain organizations or DAOs for the future. Organizations now are getting stuck in their sort of governance setups and they're not able to move and that's leading to the death of many, many projects. You have to give people reason to not sell the tokens. So there have to be something to believe in. I mean, in our industry, we wanna remove the need for that trust, hopefully. But you do need, you know, to trust people to build trust trustless technology, ironically.
Hi. I'm Eugene.
And I'm Jamila.
And this is the governance futures podcast where we explore the past, present, and future of decentralized governance.
Today, we have great conversation with Aragon CEO, Anthony Lutz. And, Eugene, just because we just finished recording, what are your impressions and thoughts right after the conversation with Anthony?
Yeah. You know, they're the way he's positioning modular governance is kind of being the first principle element of what Aragon is focused on really resonates with me. I mean, personally with, you know, my interest in the Medigov community for how many years now and, you know, like their founding paper, so to say, was modular politics and all about thinking about, what is needed to be able to enable this kind of technically modular infrastructure that can actually create for a much more robust governance system. So it's really interesting to see how, both for Anthony and knowing some of the other folks at Aragon, how this has been a continuous journey. And now a lot of these different threads are really coming together for them. And, you know, we're seeing more projects use it, and we're seeing more projects used toward a shift towards optimistic governance, and towards wanting various aspects of these modular layouts. So, yeah, that was really exciting to hear about. What about you, Jamila? What stuck out to you?
To me, it felt great somehow to know that our con CEO actually believes in human centered governance, or at least Yeah. That was my impression. We have a lot of conversations about how governance should be effective, how it should be efficient, how it should be fast, how it should be AI reliant. And all those things can be true, but often we ignore that at the core of governance, at least to me, is human judgment, is human centered governance. And it felt like today, Anthony also shared similar thoughts that he believes in humans, that a governance should be governed by humans with the help of AI. That was great to hear, and I enjoyed this conversation a lot.
Yeah. Definitely encouraging to hear the idea of efficiency and automation and improvement for the purpose of helping humans make better decisions and not to automate the decision making itself. Because, yeah, I agree with you. It gets a little worrying when people are saying something to the infective, you know, let let robots figure it all out or let the AI just make all the decisions. Maybe one day, but, in the current state of things, and please don't come after us AI overlords. But in the current state of things, yeah, much more bullish on human centered governance.
Well, I hope this is a great intro into our podcast episode. And now, to our chat with Anthony.
Alright. Well, welcome, Anthony. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much. I wanna start off the conversation by looking back to when you had first decided to focus on rebuilding Aragon and, kind of rebuilding some of the tooling from the ground up. And you said that, you know, this came from a realization that DAOs, despite really being built on unstoppable infrastructure, were really still struggling to accomplish their own goals. So I kinda wanted to start the interview by jumping back to that moment. You know, what were you seeing in the space that made you feel that doing this kind of rebuild,
was both necessary and urgent? Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on. Really excited to talk about governance, obviously. Very pressing topic, in our industry. And great first question. I mean, obviously, I've been at Eragon for four years, but Eragon's been around since, 2016, '17. So I have the benefit of being able to access projects, and people, who've been working in this vertical within our industry since that time and have that direct line of access. And pretty early on at my time at Aragon, we started ideating an entirely new DAO framework or protocol, based on what we were seeing, in the industry at the time. We were starting to see chinks in the armor of the traditional setup that was typically used at the time for what we call DAOs or called DAOs, and quickly realized that the existing stacks and solutions, including Aragon's first stack, which was the first DAO framework or protocol in 2017, were not capable, of actually, meeting the needs of on chain organizations or DAOs for the future. And so, as we learn this after speaking with, obviously, you know, quite a few large projects such as Lido, Decentraland, Curve, etcetera, which are built on Airgun, we quickly realized that the, what we call the monolithic access control frameworks of the past were not fit for the future. And that included Aradona assets itself, the original, governor bravo, which became, became, you know, sort of OpenZeppelin governor, more widely known, and SAFE being sort of a very different but third type of sort of access control mechanism that organizations are often built on. And so we began this new journey of building something that was, modular and flexible, and thus future proof, because we saw these DAOs were incapable of adapting to the changes that were required of them. And that's proven now unconditionally true, which is, you know, good and sort of bad, and that it's sort of a shame to see something that you saw earlier being a problem having actually gone through that process, and you weren't able to really fully stop it. And I wonder, I mean, at that moment when you were talking to some of these other players in 2016,
1718, how are they reacting? Were they also fully bought in that, hey. Things weren't working at that point. And, I guess, do you feel like that vibe has changed, or do you feel like you had to educate them then that things aren't working and now that realization is more sunk in?
Yeah. Interestingly, those DAOs are were slightly were different than the ones that you had in the 2021 to 2024 era. I think there were basically, like, three eras of DAOs or on chain orgs. The originals were, like, these twenty eighteen, nineteen, twenty organizations. These are the ones built on Aragon. So these are Lido, Decentraland, Curve. Actually, Aave sort of came out of that as well around that time. And to be fun like, it's funny. Those ones, most of them are doing actually quite well, which is quite interesting. The original DAOs. I would say the main difference between them and some of the others is they actually were really rooted in true decentralization and on chain control or on chain ownership actually being passed off to, the token holders. In in 2020 to 2021, we then saw this bull market, obviously, kick into gear, and gas prices increased so drastically on main net that it became very challenging for voters to participate. And what happened then was is you had this, this shift where the industry moved to two different models. Although three models were presented. One model became a snapshot save, so we call this we call this off chain signaling, where one signals, like, token holders will signal their intention, and then a multisig makes a decision whether or not it wants to execute on that decision. Then there was delegate voting, which at the time, I think started off okay, but then ended up sort of spiraling into, this sort of serial delegate, sort of platform, which now is also sort of on the way out. And that meant people could delegate their tokens away to those to participate on their behalf. And then the third was optimistic governance, which really, Aragon sort of went down this path and didn't really pick up until actually, I would say, last year, which is sort of becoming a newer wave of governance that we're seeing. So that was sort of the change. I think what also changed in that time was that previous to 2020, I think the industry was so much smaller that really, to some degree, you knew who your token holders were. They were much more aligned. There were far fewer projects. Everybody was sort of in it together. The 2021 to 2024 area was such a such an explosion in the amount of people, projects, VCs, users, etcetera, that I think projects started to see more of a risk or didn't wanna spend the energy to work with token holders actually having on chain hard power unless they sort of moved away from that. So I would hope that sort of explains how the history began. And now after 2024, we have a new paradigm now, which is starting to unearth.
And I don't think it's defined yet, but we believe that, obviously, as Eragon that we are sort of defining it from a product and and, you know, a tech perspective. Yeah. It's always so interesting to look back at those different phases of governance. Because I know when, you know, the DAO happened and it, you know, sparked so many ideas for people and that was, you know, a big, deal for me personally when I was just getting into the space was right around the time that was just kicking off, and inspired me to work on a DAO project and I got really excited. Then, yeah, it felt like intense disillusionment, and then, like, the initial ICO boom era was, you know, like you were saying, some of the OGs that cared about it for the right reasons. But still, it felt like, you know, governance was I don't even wanna say, an afterthought, but it wasn't a top priority for a lot of ecosystems. It was like, oh, we gotta figure out scaling, you know, are we sharding or are we not, and all these other fundamental technical questions. And governance was always a nth order concern. And then, like, as you're saying, DeFi summer so changed that with just the amount of money and, I guess, like, mass market and mass adoption starting to happen in a small scale.
But, yeah, such a fascinating evolution. Absolutely. And you you touched on something that's really important, which is you basically said governance got put sort of on the back burner even though in theory, governance always existed within those projects. The problem is is that people just equate governance to token holder slash delegate voting or what I call referendum vanilla referendum voting, which basically people think that a DAO is just and governance is just everybody gets to vote on everything, which doesn't really work well as a as a methodology with projects in a more start up environment trying to find product market fit and scale, which is where probably 90 plus percent of projects are at. And so that's why, like, to some degree, we've, you know, projects have moved away from that and and and they correlate governance and DAOs with this one methodology, when in fact, that's not at all what governance is, and that's not at all what DAOs need to be. Absolutely.
And so, I do wanna kinda jump back to I know you're saying you're feeling at Aragon that you're part of defining this next phase of governance. You know, I wanted to actually get a sense of how you're thinking about defining Aragon's mission today and your role in kind of stewarding governance infrastructure more broadly.
Yeah. For sure. The mission definitely, to some degree, has adjusted over the years, but it's always been centered around freedom with and that freedom is around ownership and about control and giving ownership and control to, to token holders or to those who to to the best stakeholders who are the most aligned to ensure that the organization reaches, you know, its goals. And, you know, you hope by reaching those goals that everybody gets lifted along with that. Right? And so I would say Aragon still is one of the more sort of purest sort of eth aligned sort of projects in the, like, tooling space when it comes to governance, you know, fully open source, you know, very EVM focused and Ethereum focused. But we definitely are more focused now on ensuring organizations are effective, and that's the operative word here. And, like, the goal is for those organizations to be extremely effective so they can reach their goals rather than trying to, force through, you know, decentralization as, like, as, like, a must have or something that they have to have. It's now sort of, like, well, decentralization is a means to an end, not the end itself. And we, as an organization, allow you to, basically create your governance however you want to get you to be effective to reach your goals. And that can include more decentralization at first or less to increase that over time or decrease it however you want to. Whereas it used to be, I think, for all governance providers, it's like zero to a 100. There wasn't this, like, very clean path towards reaching decentralization. And now with a modular stack, we have that. And that's much easier for projects to do from day zero, you know, setting ownable or setting the access control of their protocol. It doesn't have to be set to a DAO that only has token voting or just a safe. It can be set to an Aragon DAO, which allows you to govern your permissions and and and change them over time how you want to as you as you grow. So that's sort of how we've we've moved our mission in a way.
I wanted to follow-up on decentralization. You've mentioned it in your talks, in your x account. You think that decentralization is a spectrum, and you often refer to it as an overused term that become blurry in our space. So interestingly, also in one of your presentations, you make difference between decentralized leadership, decision making, and ownership. Could you maybe elaborate on this? Why is it critical that we separate those concepts? And where do you see most of the projects getting this wrong?
Yeah. It's a great question. I've been beating on the strum for about six months to a year now, very heavily. Decentralization, yes, is, is often a is is often a spectrum. Right? And I always say, the beauty is in the eyes of the beholders and so is decentralization. To one person, something may be decentralized where as to another, it's not, for example. So let's take some examples. There's different types of decentralization within an organization. People always look at an organization or a DAO or whatnot, and they say, oh, that's either decentralized or it's not. Well, okay. What does that mean? Right? Let's take Aave, for example, which is probably one of the most successful DAOs in in you know, of all time. And people often say, well, it's not decentralized. Mark Zeller, part of a c a m you know, ACI, has most of the delegated tokens toward himself. So it's not decentralized. And what I say to that is is very simply is, actually, Aave does not actually really have decentralized leadership a lot. It has a few really dedicated leaders that make a lot of the decisions. However, the execution and control over what decisions get made is quite decentralized and that token holders can undelegate from Mark Zeller, for example, or from ACI whenever they want and remove that power quite quickly. And so, thus, the control of Aave and its protocol and its network is quite decentralized even though it has quite centralized leadership. And you'll find that amongst most of the most successful projects is that they often do have more centralized leadership, but they may have their con their control may be decentralized. And so the problem becomes is, you know, decentralized leadership, decentralized, controller, two completely different things to some extent in the blockchain role. Because for the first time on a blockchain, we actually can decentralize control and remove the intermediary from controlling the execution of doing something. Right? We can actually remove that and place that in the hands of a wide group of people, and that intermediary can be removed. So it's an amazing and powerful thing, and that's why DAOs were, you know, originated as this amazing concept because it did open up this new capability, right, and this new ability to actually govern something without these intermediaries. And so as I was saying, within organizations, you have different types of decentralization. Right? Your team can be decentralized, by getting in new members. And, thus, you might have more, different, you know, decentralized thought processes, decentralized operations, decentralized leadership, as I mentioned. But these things are all on a spectrum. And so it becomes very hard to actually determine if something is decentralized or not. Like, who makes that determination. Right? So that's really hard. But there is something we can actually know if it's decentralized or not. And that's actually who has the control over upgrading a protocol or not, over executed. That is completely and utterly verifiable, that control and ownership on chain. And thus, it's what I recommend and you're seeing others recommend such as Miles, from a 16 zed being the most important thing that we focus on when we refer to decentralization, that control and that ownership. Because then we remove all the obfuscation. You know, it doesn't it it no. It's not that it doesn't matter that that these other aspects of an organization are decentralized or not. It's just that it's up to that organization to do that or not and for its stakeholders to decide what it needs to be successful. But when we're actually talking about whether or not something is, you know, decentralized or not, we can look at the blockchain and we can determine if the ownership and control actually is. And so that's not really on a spectrum, and thus, it's not subjective. It is objective, and that's why it becomes easier to understand and more important.
You've spoken about the tensions between the founder control and the sniffer light decision making. You've also mentioned, as far as I remember that that actually led to many DAOs, many communities kind of, like, by default use multisigs rather than actually implementing some governance that would involve participatory governance. So my question here, and I would really love to talk about Aragon and modular governance that you've touched upon. Why do you think the crypto industry has struggled to offer viable alternatives to multisig? And why would it take to make on chain governance genuinely compelling? So not just technical tooling, but also culturally, maybe it's the matter of, right economic incentives for both funders and token holders.
Yeah. It's a great question. I think, you know, to the first part of it, like, why hasn't the industry done x, y, and zed? I I think the reality is that most projects are just desperately searching for product market fit, and and, you know, for growth, for example. And so they don't focus on necessarily these things. And the reason they don't focus on them because somebody hasn't come around and said, okay. Here's an easier way to do this. So they revert back to just I need to get, you know, I need to get this done with, and I can easily do that by just moving the permissions over here, you know, very easily into a multisync and move forward and move on from this. Right? I don't have to worry about losing control over certain things. I don't have to worry about, token holders being too engaged and and causing problems, etcetera. So, I think that now the technology has started to mature enough where we can have alternatives, which is quite important. Yeah. So I think that's that's super, super critical is and and the reason being is that organizations now we're starting to see are getting stuck in their sort of governance setups, and they're not able to move or adjust. And that's leading to the death of many, many projects. And so by allowing organizations to adapt and change over time, this can sort of help them actually make these adjustments and actually succeed and be effective. You know, an example is, like, you can start with, obviously, something like optimistic governance where, you your multisig, you know, has control to put up a proposal to, you know, change, or to upgrade your protocol, for example. And you can put token holders at the end with a veto and a time lock where they can exit. So this gives them the safety they need, but also gives you the control you need to work more quickly and effectively. And then later, that can easily with this with a vote be changed to token holders having full control or being removed and, you know, becomes very easy and fluid to make these changes and with a lot less risk. So I'd say that's, like, sort of how we've sort of allowed this modularity to come into play. And I think it's really, really critical that we start to look at a DAO, the organization on a blockchain, as the executor. Most of the time, organ you know, people think, okay, the DAO is the token holders. And I think this is really, really problematic. Because just like a normal organization in the world, you would typically refer to that organization as, well, that organization is based in this location. That is the legal wrapper of that organization. That is the organization. And within that organization, you can have different stakeholders, governing bodies, doing different things to reach your goals. We don't call, you know, the team the organization. We don't call the shareholders the organization. The organization is the organization, and there are these different stakeholders. And it should be the same on the blockchain. The token holders are not the DAO. The executor is the DAO. And what that means is that you can have the executor is this root permission that actually executes a transaction that somebody might want to make. Right? And so if we make the executor the DAO, it means we can change the governance logic on top of that to suit the needs of the organization and change that over time. It means we can have token holders that can have powers over certain things. A multisig can have power over other things. Digital identification, for example, could have power over other things. And it means we can have govern different governing bodies making different decisions within a DAO and within that organization itself to reach its goals. Why? Because certain stakeholders or certain contributors or certain individuals or AI are better at making decisions on certain things than other people. Like, for example, like, do we want all our developers who would be, you know, putting forward a proposal upgrade to the protocol to be making the decisions on marketing, for example, or making a you know, owning the Lendly account on the blockchain? Exactly. Right? Should they be making the decision on where the the money gets distributed or how incentives are distributed? Probably not. Right? And so you need these different governing bodies within a DAO, and we call the separations of power where they have power over certain things. So I think if we started to reframe everything as the DAO is the executor, that is the DAO itself. And within it, we can have multiple governing bodies doing different things. We start to actually get somewhere that makes sense, and it actually logically makes more sense too, in my personal opinion. So I think that's a really, like, crucial step. It feels like, all those things that you just mentioned,
overall realizations that DAO were suffering was, at the core when you launched the new protocol, Argon OS X. Correct me if I'm mispronouncing it. That's perfect. Before jumping into the tooling and just the updated mission and vision, I actually wanted to ask you a question because you mentioned you've been there for the past four years. How has it been this change? Because I remember from my early PhD days, I was looking at Aragon, and the first thing that came to my mind was Aragon Court. At that time, that was maybe three years ago. So could you maybe very briefly describe that journey where you decided to refocus your vision and what is that vision that you have now looking ahead and, perhaps that all links together to some of the issues that you've mentioned that DAOs are suffering and that you are aiming to solve?
Yeah. So we Eragon had a huge, you know, very public restructuring in twenty twenty twenty one, which I think needed time to mature. And in 2023, really, I think, matured quite well at that point. Fundamental shift in team, in the board, everything, which was super needed, and, things haven't been honestly better since. Aragon started off really its goal wasn't to just build, like, this sort of DAO tooling, actually. But it start it needed to like, these things didn't exist on Ethereum, so it started to build different products to dog food in order to get to its end goal of building sort of this network state. And so one of them was how do we control things? Okay. Well, we need access control. Okay. Great. Eragon OS, the original, which Lido is on, for example, was built. Then they said, okay. Well, what if there's what if there are disputes? Okay. Well, now we need a dispute mechanism. And so it built Eragon Court, which we just sunset and and never really got anywhere, to be frank, from the old team, but it still, you know, was inspirational and referenced in, like, the Eigen white paper, for example. And to this day, it's still actually a pain point for sure in the industry. You just saw, like, obviously, Polymarket is having problems with its dispute mechanism. And an article is written by Messari about how Aragon Court would have solved it, which is ironic and hilarious because, like, no. No. We've we've moved on from Aragon Court years ago. Even leave it alone. But Aragon Court was, yeah, sort of revolutionary at that time as was Clarus, of course, working on something very similar. And so I think we realized we needed to get back to our, like, the core root problem, which is that organizations on chain are not effective. And I was, how can we fix this and solve this? Hence, we launched Airgun OSX, which which allows you know, it's a very modular governance framework and protocol, which allows you to basically govern or manage your access control of all your on chain assets and resources, including your your own protocol,
Right? Go ahead. So to follow-up here, just so that our listeners understand as well, in AragonOax, you define DAOs are as treasuries, with permission management system. And from functional point of view, it's kind of like a opt in plug in system. Do I understand it correctly?
It's an access control system that allows x person to do x action under x circumstance. Sounds very, like, basic at, like, the core primitive and root. Right? And so that's access control. Then you can start to layer governance on top of it using what we call plug ins. So you can say, okay. I want token holders to be able to do x action under x circumstance, etcetera. I want a multisig. Right? What you can't do with any other monolithic framework is you cannot mix and match those. Right? You have to start adding external things in. So with Aragon, you can have multiple governing bodies. You can have a multisig and token holder voting and digital identification, all governing cohesively your assets, resources, and your protocol on top of each other. So you can have multiple governing bodies in one stage. You can say, okay. It requires this multisig and this multisig to pass this proposal, or it requires this multisig and it will pass optimistically and these token holders can veto. So you can really design whatever you want. You don't need to have and you don't need to have multiple governors or multiple multisigs to do that. So it all bundles it very cleanly together because these plugins allow you to plug in multiple governance methodologies at the same time, or you can put them in stages with our stage proposal processor. You can say, you can only execute if it meets these requirements. Stage one, stage two, stage three, and you start to move forward with, like, actually building, like, really good governance and and systems that are redundant and safe and secure, etcetera. And I guess also just to clarify in that sense, cause I know you're mentioning some of the access control and, you know, I really think Hats is probably the only player up until now that has somewhat played in that direction. Just to clarify for listeners, are there any actual similarities between OS X, and something like hats? Are they meant to actually be, you know, very easily parable together? They're meant to be easily parable together. What hats doesn't do from my understanding is the execution of these things. Right? So Hats allows you to customize role what they would call roles, and where you can customize what role can do what under what circumstance. So they're quite similar in that sense, but Aragon has is, like, this deeper permission management system with vaults. So we have a treasury with the access control so you can make your upgrades. And I think hats relies on a governor or an Aragon OSX governor or a safe to be able to do these things, and they can play nicely with it. So you can easily have Aragon where you have your your multisigs and your token holders or your digit identification on Eragon, and then you can plug in hats as a plug in and say, okay. I want to put this role on that specific individual or on that specific multisig and, you know, and make those roles atomic within your system.
So Hats needs Aragon to do these things or a competitor of Aragon, let's say. So they work too well together. I also wanted to touch upon dual governance. I know that you are a delegate at Lido. You mentioned Lido before. So, we'll be curious to hear your thoughts on the direction that governance at Lido is taking. So whether you see it as a necessary evolution for aligning protocol and validator interests, or are there maybe trade offs, between the community and other stakeholders that we should be more aware of? Very curious to hear your insights, whatever you're comfortable sharing, of course. Yeah. Dual governance is amazing.
It's the probably one of the best user protection mechanisms, I wouldn't just say in Web three, but in the entire world, where the actual user, the depositor, or this, you know, the stETH holder actually has hard on chain power to stop a potentially malicious or a wrong upgrade that could impact their investment or their, you know, themselves holding stETH. And And so it sort of works in an escalation game where basically, like, LDO holders of the LIDO protocol can, you know, obviously put up a proposal and they have direct on chain governance. But then it enters this period, this you know, it's optimistic, but it enters this period where stake ETH holders can veto it. If they reach a certain amount of the veto, it then pauses to go into a larger veto where even more stake holders must reach that requirement to veto it. So it's probably one of the most ether lines, like, user protection mechanisms I've ever seen where it puts hard power in the hand of the depositor LP provider, the user itself, not just the token holder. Right? It's all about incentive alignment here, and this puts power in their hands. And we've started to see this be replicated, and it validates Aragon's build, so much more because now in Aragon, yes, you can add in for example, Morfo has guardians. So similar system to, on Aragon, so much system to Lido where actually depositors in Morpho, not the Morpho token itself, but the LP providers, the depositors of steakhouse USDC or, you know, gauntlet USDC, actually, the ones who use an Aragon Guardian can veto a potential change in a vault, which could be potentially malicious or or wrong, and then they have time with a time lock to exit. And so, you know, I think we have over 700,000,000 in TVL of those vaults. So this dual governance is mechanism is really great because it it validates optimistic governance in that you let teams or people who are really good at what they do work optimistically, but then you have this fail safe mechanism for the users themselves to actually block it, defend themselves, and leave potentially if they want to. So it's really smart, and we see it continue to grow, and it works out of the box on on OSX because of the modularity.
You mentioned that, optimistic governance and just wanted to recheck here with you. As of right now, most DAOs, most governance systems, to my knowledge at least, correct me if I'm wrong, there still involve delegated governance where delegates vote in certain proposals. There are different thresholds. There are different requirements for the proposal to pass. But more or less, it's all within the same framework of, you know, delegated governance. And it seems like from what you're saying, the future of governance might be, and I'm looking a little bit ahead here, is optimistic veto based governance, which doesn't involve all the time all the community for deliberations, not even delegates. But more so, there is a group, there is the right to pass a veto, but something I I I don't know how to phrase it exactly, if you can help me here. But somehow, like, optimistic veto based governance. Is that the future of governance going forward, do you think?
I think it's gonna play, continue to play a larger role. It just continues to grow. I mean, Polygon are have used are now using on Aragon. Tyco are now using it on Aragon. It's continuing to grow. Now it doesn't mean that delegation doesn't exist. In fact, it is sort of a form of delegation, you know. In fact, you know, the multisig that, puts up the proposals to some degree, you know, is a delegate, you could say. Right? That power is delegated to them if you decide that token holders can actually choose who's on it. So you can tailor the system. Right? And it doesn't mean that token holders still can't delegate. Like, in Aragon, they can still delegate, and they're still delegates, but their their their power for, say, a protocol upgrade might be simply to veto. And by the way, it doesn't mean that another governance process within the same DAO, let's say, you know, choosing incentives or turning on the fee switch, for example, won't have, you know, vanilla delegate based governance. Like, that's like, that can totally be a a possibility. Like, a good example, it's not delegate governance, but layer zero only have one form of community based or token holder based governance, and that's for their fee switch. Every six months, the fee switch automatically turns on. This fee switch turns on, and then token holders can vote to turn on the fee switch. And it's a dynamic quorum. That quorum actually if it fails, that it and the next six months happens, the quorum continues to decrease. It started at, like, 70%. So super challenging. So this is what I mean by modular governance. You can have different processes for different permissions, so governing different things in different ways. So there might be a world where, you know, token holders get to vote on everything, and they get to delegate that away for certain things. It just might not be for everything, and not every decision will be made that way, and it probably shouldn't. So that's my thought process on it for sure. It's not that those things are going anywhere. It's just that they may be specifically focused on certain permissions or certain things that they need to govern rather than this big umbrella of everything goes up for a vote, everything takes two, three weeks, everybody votes on everything,
which we're just not seeing working. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions on regulation, and it doesn't have to be anything specific. Although, we do have news, from The United States with the Clarity Act, which made a lot of news, and crypto Twitter is booming with different opinions on the act. From what I see, the response is generally positive. Firstly, I wanted to ask you on just how you see, governance relating to regulation. Because sometimes we talk to some of our guests and they say that governance is a response to regulatory pressure. First question, whether you agree with that. And second, if you're comfortable maybe talking a little bit some of the new changes, the Clarity Act in The United States, will be great to hear from your perspective whether it pushes forward. Bigo Clarity helps, projects to innovate or whether it's just another layer of governance that may not necessarily bring those, positives that so many people hope it would bring. Yeah. I think
I'm surprised at how much regulations actually did impact governance in the past. I would say a lot of, you know, larger DAOs were focused on on reg the regulatory environment and making sure that they fit within that, which is, I think, why a lot of them went down these paths that didn't really work out because they they weren't making these decisions based on what's best for the organization or token holders or whatnot. They ended up making these decision, like, decisions based on the regulatory environment. And so a lot of them were designed by lawyers, for example. And and lawyers typically shouldn't be designing how you build, operate, and run an organization.
Many people would argue over here.
Possibly. Possibly. Let alone a large network, but but they definitely have a place in it. But, yeah, you're right. So, yeah, that was a large that was a large impact, and it and it headed down that direction. And and now since, you know, Donald Trump you know, and I knew the second it happened, he launched his meme coin. I knew all bets were off. I knew I knew that was gonna be what we all like to call crime season now where there's no attempt anymore to even pretend, until these new regulations come in. So I do think it's quite important that these regulations come in. Sadly, I thought we were building a system that didn't rely on these things, but it's very clear that that we sadly have. And so let's see how it lands. I think there's some, like, very clear misnomers out there in our industry, like the Clarity Act has somehow passed. That's not true at all. It hasn't passed the senate. It passed the house who helped design it, and it's not looking very promising that it will pass the senate very easily. And I don't know why people are saying it has. I think, you know, because that that's leading people into building in the wrong direction before any actual decision is being made. The reality of the situation is that the house, along with some really intelligent people, put up what's called the Clarity Act, which passed the house. It now has to go to the senate. And the senate has its own proposal or act that it is putting forward that is very different from the Clarity Act. Very, very, very different, and is not this control based Mhmm. Mechanism, which I sort of discussed earlier, where you have to sort of, you know, give up control to token holders over an extended period of time. And so, you know, projects need to be very hesitant right now in jumping towards making a decision because, it hasn't been made. And let's see how it how, you know, how and if and when it will be made. I will say that the Clarity Act looks very reasonable. It looks quite intelligent. It was put together by very intelligent people, who have been working on this for a long time and really understand the nuances of the technology, of the technology, of the systems, and of, of course, like, trying to balance projects being able to work very effectively and efficiently and fast, but also protecting token holders, which is not happening. Like, that's very clear, to be honest. So I think that they've come with a good balance. I need to do more research on what the senate have put forward, but it it it's very different. And so we need to see what happens, and and, unfortunately, we won't know. And I I don't even know if we'll know before the, the midterms, I think, they're called. But we do have somebody working on our team, Jessica. She her previously was, working at Meta in policy and advocacy. So she comes from, like, a pure war, you know, background in that space. Probably was no bigger battleground than the social media battleground, And she's, works at Aragon is very aware and is working with people to make sure that we're up to date and that projects building in Aragon are very up to date as well.
So what would you advise to projects that are a little bit in a waiting period right now? Would you advise them to wait a little bit more or just to take a guess? Hopefully, that their bet would be the one that works out in the end. Because I have background in law, and, I agree with you. I don't think lawyers should necessarily be the only ones who are designing governance. But I do think it's important to have sometimes legal perspective. Just because in the early legal days, I've encountered so many talented builders who completely disregarded any regulation. And their take was, well, whatever. We will deal with it. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And I personally know several projects that unfortunately weren't able to to just raise any funds or continue to build any longer because they run into the war of regulation. And that happened in the EU. So, yes, question back to you. What do you think the project should do right now?
Yeah. I mean, they should speak to their counsel, as you said, and and definitely get their advice and not make decisions based on what people say on Twitter, or on what people who are not lawyers say. You know? I think our industry loves to pretend like we're everything, a lawyer, a developer, etcetera. Listen to the professionals, listen to your lawyer, listen to, you know, your developers, but also stay true to, being honest and building the right incentives, aligning the right incentives to ensure your project reaches where it needs to reach. And I think, often, like, it's pretty clear when you're making a decision whether something is right or wrong, and history will eventually sign with the projects that made the right decisions, hopefully. And I do think that it's not like there's no laws right now, by the way. Like, yes, Trump has Trump has set this precedent, and you can see it with, like, the the certain projects that have launched like Zuora and I forget the other one who said, like, this is a meme coin literally to follow, you know, this precedent set by the president. But that doesn't mean that there aren't laws that exist currently, and it doesn't mean that eventually the blockchain doesn't lie that, you know, they'll go back and take a look at certain projects and say, like, you weren't doing this in good faith. So I think, like, practicing and working in good faith is very important. And the reality of that is is that, like, projects that have a lot at stake need to have amazing and good governance, both for two things, offense and defense. I think we look at like, in our industry, we look at governance as defensive. Oh, I must defend this. I have to defend that. It's like, it's also an offensive mechanism towards reaching your goals, and you need to ensure that both the defense and offense are taken care of. Is your protocol and the funds of those users, etcetera, secure, more defensive? And are you reaching your goals through the right incentive alignment, the offensive? And that's why we've obviously been working on, you know, this huge, renaissance of VE gauges, which has come roaring back because it really attempts to align incentives so that we can, like, reach our goals and that there's, like, actually value in holding your token and that you actually meet the regulatory environment where it's at and that things are distributed in an autonomous or in a decentralized manner. And that's why we've had this rebuttal. So you have offense and defense, and projects need to focus on both.
And it's interesting to, you know, think about the various elements that you're bringing up in the sort of relationship between how regulation might shape the future of governance and how the future of governance, can either potentially shape regulation in its own way or at least has to, you know, react under it and live under it. And so, you know, now we're in this, hard pivot time relative to last year where we're we're in crime season and from the era of Gary Gensler, that feels like a hard turn. And, you know, we don't know how many hard terms are are waiting for us in ahead of us as well. So I guess, especially given your position, given where Aragon is, how do you think about that dynamic between, you know, how much are we now just responding to and reacting and say being, whether defensive or offensive in our actions, but in reaction to the regulatory, regiment that has been put forth versus do you think, whether yourself or governance, you know, protocols, governance projects, or just any ecosystem that truly values governance, How much is now actually the time to be proactive in some kind of way to ensure that, you know, whatever we build up for the next two, three years doesn't then all have to hard pivot because a new group came in with completely different ideas?
It's everything we've built for is is is exactly this. Like, we are not sweating at all. We're super pumped. We're enjoying ourselves. Like, it's it's all about core fundamental principles at the end of the day. You look at the core principles and you you build for those core principles, which is what are the pain points of users. And the pain points of users is when you have when you don't have a clear regulatory environment, well, what do you need? You need flexibility. How do you get flexibility? You need modularity. So, like, you just have to follow the core principles, and then you start to realize that under any circumstance, these core principles work. You know, speaking with, like, one of the top, you know, lawyers, won't name him, in in our industry the other day, and he was, you know, talking to me about the Doona, which is this new legal wrapper, that could be used potentially by DAOs in the future or can actually now, but will which might fit in very well with upcoming regulations. And I showed him the stack and showed him how you can customize what you want, and he said, this is perfect for Aduna. And I said, great. Like, this is exactly what we've built for at these moments to allow the builder to not have to stress about this. Like, you don't need to stress about what your organization is gonna look like, on chain in these regulations because you can just come in and say, I wanna set it up like this to meet these regulations or not, by the way. I wanna go down the privacy, you know, dark DAO route. Well, great. That all works on Aragon perfectly because we set it up like this. It's, like, the whole purpose. So there are core fundamental things that don't need to be changed. It's one that you have the flexibility to be adaptable as an organization, which you couldn't do previously. And the second is that you have the right that your incentives are aligned with all your stakeholders, which has been a problem in the past. These two core fundamental, like, root problems in our industry, when solved, will always lead your organization to being successful if you're able to do that easier said than done, of course. Right? But, like, if you get these core fundamental principles right and we empower you to do that, you'll be successful. So that's what we focus on every day. We don't let the noise bother us. Like, whether or not the clarity act comes in or not is irrelevant for Aragon because if the Clarity Act comes in, we're perfectly set up for it. If it doesn't, we're perfectly set up for that, you know, that that other inevitability
as well. It's easy for us. You've laid out the vision that the governance is modular, and you've also several times, I think in your talks and today during our conversation, mentioned, on chain control. I also think there was incentive aligned governance. Would you add anything else to the mix? I'm kind of like I'm guessing effective, successful decentralized governance. So let me let me regroup. Modular, incentive aligned, verifiable on chain. Is there anything else?
No. That's good enough, I think. We don't wanna throw we don't wanna throw too many words in there. Right? It takes a lot to to to have a network. Like, these aren't just organizations. Like, these are networks. It takes a lot of thinking, a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of resources to build a successful network, especially in an industry where, like, oh my god. It's, like, hypercompetitive. Right? And and so, like, you need to be adaptable very clear. How do you become adaptable through modularity as you just said? Right? But none of that matters if all your incentives are misaligned, which has definitely been the case for most projects in the past, where, like, what was the point in holding this token? You launch your airdrop. You give out this token to everybody. You've you've made it. You know, people, you know, you made it. And then everybody sells your token. Why? Because, well, they're they're not receiving anything for holding this token. There's no value to them. They don't have on chain control. So, literally, it's useless. They don't have any legal rights, by the way, in the past. Like, you know you know, that's why, you know, the people are asking for regulation because there were no legal rights. You had no legal rights. You had no on chain control, which would be most organization, and and no value across the token. So what the heck do you have as a token holder? You have absolutely nothing. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna sell. And every project now who's watching their token go to zero is quickly realizing, holy crap. I better freaking start fixing some of the stuff. So what are the options I have in my toolbox? Right? And so, you know, that's where we help and step in. But, yeah, like, it's it's tough. You know? It's it's not easy. Founders, you know, have to have to keep working on it every day. Where would you say a project that just
came to realization that, yes, their their token, doesn't have any use, so to speak. Where would you start if you were in that position to align incentives, to prevent people from just selling everything, once they get the chance, what would be your advice? Or at least the direction they should look into, except for modular governance. Is there anything else?
Yeah. You You have to give them some reason to hold that token. Something. So so one is, obviously, you need to focus on, product market fit and ensuring that you can create value. Right? So one and that's tough in and of itself. But once you create a value, I hope there's a mechanism for that value to eventually, at some point, accrue to the token. Right? That's the key. If there's no if there's no ever hope in that, then really, you're gonna struggle because how are you ever going to bring value to that token holder? You know, there are simple ways, like, giving up control, provide like, you know, things like this, but I I I fundamentally believe that's very important. But, like, that's not gonna technically move the needle in 2025. I think right now, like, with the current meta, people wanna know if you're not sending that value to the token, which, by the way, some products shouldn't be. Like, if you're focused on growth, like, you should be sending all that value back to growth. But token holders will under I think for the most part, will understand that. But they wanna know that it's possible that one day you're gonna be able to move value to that token so that this thing that they purchased has value. Right? And then projects need to work within the regulatory environment or not, to to actually make that happen. And we know that, like, probably either being immutable or automated or via decentralized governance is are possible ways to do that safely. And so you have to figure out how to make that happen. But first step, get product market fit. If you haven't if you've ever launched your token with no product market fit, okay, now you really need to double down on getting that product market fit. And then you need to build a system where the value can accrue to the token, I e v e gage is just as one example, so that people have a reason to hold hold it and so that value can increase over time. That's good advice. Thank you.
Yeah. Is your is your said than done? Many listeners are finding themselves in having the same thought. Oh, yes. He's so right. But you mentioned it felt like trust would be this underlying condition and growth, obviously, making sure that there is a market fit, making sure that there is correct incentives. But would you agree that it would start with some idea or trust? You said you have to give people reason to not sell the tokens, so there have to be something to believe in. Yeah. Totally. I mean, I I think I think the key is to I mean, in our industry, we wanna remove the need for that trust, hopefully.
But you do need, you know, to trust people to build trust trustless technology, ironically. And so I think, you know, I I I think by setting up a system I personally believe by setting up a system where it's very clear that if value accrues, it can eventually go to the token, that that's one of the biggest steps in identifying the problem and let it signaling to token holders that this is actually a priority and that one day, it can happen so that they know that. I think that's that's it. And you you can remove the trust with that, to be frank, by building the system to to turn on when it wants to turn on or when people want it to turn on or when you're ready and transparent about turning it on. So I I I definitely think that you can signal these things by building properly. I want to ask a couple questions on the future of governance. Well, our podcast is governance futures.
So we wanted to ask you what your thoughts on AI's role in the future of governance. Very often, we see some of the articles, papers, I'm sure you also run into somewhat version of AI based either agent or some tooling that helps that as a promise to solve all of the problems. So curious to hear whether you at Aragon are planning to experiment or already experimenting with AI and then in what form, And what do you think the future of governance would look like considering that we're just so overly reliant on AI even for daily things? It feels like we're just not going to Google anymore. We're going to judge EPT or any other alternatives.
Yeah. I mean, AI is gonna have a huge impact on governance. There's no question. I mean, we've sort of validated that it's very challenging to, you know, run a very decentralized network with a decentralized group of humans, and we, like, are pretty confident that AI eventually can, you know, remove some of those pain points, especially in increasing speed while con like, keeping that decentralization. We are working on it ourselves. For example, like, we have these sort of auto voters that work only within a v e gauge system. Because in a v e gauge system, the voter is typically more focused on voting for for what will generate the most value for them because they have the proportion amount of voting power is the proportion amount of of funds that they'll receive back. So so it makes more sense in in that, you know, in that particular area. And so that alleviates the requirement for them to have to continuously come in to vote or change their vote for, you know, directing, you know, liquidity, for example. So that's, like, one example where work working on it. And so, like, it reduces their burden, and, thus, it reduces the apathy that eventually gets created, by having to vote too often. But we don't wanna, like, throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don't like, we still think that decision making inherently is done better by humans as long as the inputs that the humans receive is very good. And so we still think that that's a very, like, core and important. And we think auto automation AI is gonna, at first, really focus around the edges, ensuring that the right information is, created, ensuring that you can, you know, in a tough regulatory environment, distribute incentives in an automated way to the token, for example, or to distribute, for example, grants or distribute, incentives to those who are bringing the most value to your chain. That can be subjective, of course, but there are objective components in there that you could automate with AI, for example. So that's how we're working on it. We're trying to take those, like, those particular points where it's very objective, where where where there isn't so much subjectivity, and then trying to automate that with AI to create a better experience for, you know, token holders and and participants and stakeholders. But it's it's gonna be critical. I mean, I think that's that's inevitable. So AI as the tooling?
Yes. AI as an AI agent that would replace human judgment? No. That that that is my oversimplification. Did I catch no. Not yet. Not yet.
Yes. Yes. I know. I think it was great. Not yet. But I I I honestly think that first, I think big
AI should be governed
by humans in a in a more decentralized manner or at least more transparent manner. I sadly can't name who they are, but there's some very large AI crypto projects that we're working with exactly this to ensure that, you know, like, the AI itself, the machine learning model is actually, like, governed by a distinct group of people and a large group of people, so that, you know, so that it's safe. That that is, I would say, equally as interesting for me is the reverse. Yes. I've heard, I think Swiss government
developed, first ethical AI. Don't quote me on that. It's either the government or the lab, but it's based in Switzerland, I believe. And How safe. And I just see so many conversations about actually, yes, who actually governs AI? And I think at first that part was completely overlooked, and now we're going back and say, oh, actually, wait a minute. Is it actually decentralized? How is it? What information is being fed to it?
And, that is very interesting. And I feel like we could spend a whole hour talking about AI and ethical considerations and governance of it. Yeah. And I know another thing you've brought up throughout the conversation, and I just wanted to make sure to give you a chance to expand on a little bit, is gauges. And I know some folks might feel familiar, but I I'm sure we're at least some of our listeners might only be hearing about it for the first time. So do you mind briefly mentioning what you mean by gauges and why you see them as such an integral part of this kind of modular future that I Argon is building towards?
Yeah. Gauges allow you to autonomously, quite quickly and effectively move, assets, for example, incentives to distribute things, very quickly. And so, basically, it usually gets paired with what we call v e, vote escrow. It's it's it's a locking mechanism, and it tries to create what we call a growth flywheel. It was invented by Curve on Aragon in 2020. Aerodrome picked it up, I don't know how long ago, but, you know, and have been wildly successful. And the point of the system is basically to give token holders a reason to hold the token, right, and to to empower and to incentivize, and to reward token holders who are actively engaged in providing a service. So the methodology works is that a token holder simply stakes or locks their token. There's this sort of misnomer that it has to have this, like, four year time period, but it's not true. You can sort of design it how you want it. But you create this mechanism for token holders to lock their token for x period of time, which is defined usually by the protocol itself. And this means that they are now long term aligned because they're locked into the system which they're participating in. And so then they get to choose or distribute incentives, emissions, revenue, whatever it might be, to through gauges, through these gauges, these pipes, two different options. And those options historically have been for directing, like, liquidity. Right? Where liquidity goes, but it's expanded beyond that. And now we have roll ups deciding on what apps to incentivize to because they wanna grow apps on their chain or to what, streamers recently Mode Network have been doing. Streamers are actually, trading on YouTube on their, on their, on their chain. So it's it's a mechanism. And then, to distribute these incentives or these rewards, and then the actual voter gets a small piece back. So they get some actually, they're incentivized. They're paid to do this. And then now there's a reason to hold the token. They're getting paid to hold the token. They're getting paid to make decisions on behalf of everybody that is best aligned with what they think is the long term trajectory of the project. And then they receive these rewards, which they can lock to increase the amount they get back to do this, and it creates this flywheel, a growth flywheel, where you have long term incentive, aligned participants who are directing awards proportionately for what they hold, and this cycle continues. And so it seems to be quite net positive in that sense. And it promises, as I told earlier, like, it really indicates and proves that you're willing to, you know, provide some value to the token. So, like, the v e gauge mechanism is not new, let's say, but it's having a huge rebound right now, in the face of a new regulatory environment, in the face of the fact that most tokens have continued to go to zero, because there was no reason to hold them, and this provides them that reason. And now we also have a new design space in the v e gauge system. There have been people who are sort of against it because it used to require this four year lockup, and your voting power decreased over time. Well, now you can choose a one month lockup where your voting power increases over time. You can really, like, customize it to, like, really, incentivize your token holders and participants, to make the best decisions in order to move the whole protocol and project forward. And It just so happens that it's very automated. It's very decentralized, which is also very fair and great from a regulatory perspective.
And broadly speaking, where are the rewards coming in from there? Is it from the treasuries of the actual ecosystems? Is it more inflationary, or is it from a a different area altogether?
It can be whatever you decide. So for Aerodrome, for example, I think last week, it was, they were the project that generated the most revenue that was given back to token holders. So it's revenue based. And so for some projects, they have to make this decision. It's like, you know, giving some value back to token holders for participating in the network, obviously, is a cost, and they need to decide how much of that goes towards potentially growth or how much goes towards incentivization. It can be a small part in incentivization or a lot, but the great part is is that those people are getting incentivized that are often doing the distributing or the incentivizing. So it all works in, like, a very coherent system, and it's a lot better than it used to be. It's it's it's it's really quite flexible now and and and works quite well. So, yeah, that's that's the TLDR of it. But we unfortunately have very limited time.
And before I give the floor to Eugene with our wonderful quiz, I wanted to ask you one question on, we spoke a lot about modularity. Well, you did. And, what is in your view one of the hurdles? Why is it not being adopted more if you feel like it actually will solve so many challenges that you see DAOs struggle today? What is what is this reason? Why is it not being popularized more? Is it too new? Is it too complex? Are we too stuck in our ways and it's hard for us to change?
All of the above. It just takes time. Like, everything requires Lindy and everything requires takes you know, everything takes time for people to, to move on to. I would say our growth right now is is faster than that of our competitors, which is great. So we're finally, like, the snowball, you have to push it uphill and, like, you push it uphill, and then all of a sudden, it if you make it, it starts to roll downhill. And then in our industry, like any other, it just you know, the the snowball grows and keeps running. And so I think it's just different for people have to make decisions, and this is something they have to think about, and it's complex. But now, obviously, it's it's working, and it takes time. It takes it you know, you need Lindy on these on these things, and now we have billions of dollars over x amount of time. And so it's just inevitable, and, it continues to grow. And and I do think the regulatory environment does matter in our particular vertical. Like, there's no question. Like, right now, everybody's put decentralized governance on on hold for the most part. Some projects haven't, but but most have and are sort of waiting to see where things land before they make decisions. And then the great part is is they'll, you know, they'll have to make those decisions, and and,
we'll be ready. I appreciate you you filling us in there. And, yeah, I think in the interest of time, despite how much I feel like we'd both wanna pepper you with all kinds of other questions, we'll move on to our final segment, which is the quiz portion, which is me giving you a couple questions for which we ask for one word answers. So the first one, Anthony, what does Ethereum mean to you in one word?
Freedom.
What is a topic or idea that you wish more folks involved in governance had top of mind in one word?
Alignment.
If you had to design a DAO from scratch, what's the first priority?
One word? In one word. PMF.
It's it's good. We'll we'll consider that a hyphenate as well, and we'll we'll let that slide. And then last but not least, what's the future of governance in one word?
Effective. Very boring. I know.
I was gonna I was wondering if it would be modular based on the conversation, but that is definitely something beautiful too. Modular equals a factor. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation, Anthony. It was a pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on. Really appreciate it. 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.