Ahoy! Another week, another batch of hot takes from the wild world of crypto, DAOs, and governance.

We’ve got everything from foundation fatigue and Gitcoin drama to Vitalik’s vision for secret ballots and a fresh governance pulse on Solana.

Let’s get to it 🧵👇

First, @owocki drops a meta-bomb.

Gitcoin is coordination infrastructure… having a coordination failure.

If your coordination tooling project collapses due to coordination issues, is that… poetic? Or a bug report?

When your coordination-failure-software-solutions venture itself has a coordination failure, we call that a coordination failure coordination failure

Kev.Ξth

internet citizen, DAO cartographer, EVM whisperer & chaos magician.  spin bits for fun/profit, watch out for my MegaByte!

Crypto, China, Nashville, American politics.
Did the DeFi thing and then the DAO thing. 
doing things @ www.powerhouse.inc
Writing things @ www.doseofdefi.com



First, @owocki drops a meta-bomb.

Gitcoin is coordination infrastructure… having a coordination failure.

If your coordination tooling project collapses due to coordination issues, is that… poetic? Or a bug report?
https://x.com/owocki/status/1925619336741261705

Next, @vitalik.eth philosophizing on the next era of governance - private voting.

Secret ballots aren’t just for nation-states—they’re critical to the next phase of DAO governance.

Privacy enables pluralism.

summary_large_image

IMO UN resolution votes should be secret ballot.

Each country can choose (and replace) their own representative, but once the choice is made, what the representative does is up to their own conscience.

Less "pressuring" by great powers, more seeing how people really think. https://t.co/2FoVA8SNbP

More generally, perhaps a core theme of the next wave of democracy will be less "transparency and accountability" and more deliberate indirection and room for (pluralistic, aggregated) individual conscience.

(this applies to DAOs too; eg. see NounsDAO https://t.co/Wy6p7Wftsz)

vitalik.eth

Next, @vitalik.eth philosophizing on the next era of governance - private voting.

Secret ballots aren’t just for nation-states—they’re critical to the next phase of DAO governance.

Privacy enables pluralism.
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1925117986890752302

Next an interlude to the best take on the goofy OpenAI/io video announcement this week

@drnick with a "shout it from the rooftop" take: 

Most of Ethereum’s validator revenue—$4B+—should’ve been burned or sent to DAOs, not hoarded.

Feels like the ETH equivalent of Amazon paying dividends during growth mode.

NFT season sure was a crazy time https://t.co/lESeMD95WU

Ok here’s an Ethereum hot take. 

The majority of this $4bn in REV shouldn’t have been burned. It should have gone into a DAO.

Nick Almond

@drnick with a "shout it from the rooftop" take: 

Most of Ethereum’s validator revenue—$4B+—should’ve been burned or sent to DAOs, not hoarded.

Feels like the ETH equivalent of Amazon paying dividends during growth mode.
https://x.com/DrNickA/status/1924026084946780406

Speaking of @drnick he is joining Jito as Head of Governance, signaling a positive shift for Solana’s governance culture.

But @james.eth fires back, urging folks not to be too jaded about Ethereum DAOs. Progress is slow, but real.

@blockchainjames @jito_sol @solana I’m happy to be pushed on that, but we don’t exactly have infinite mechanisms do we? 

The ethereum DAO space is pretty locked in to some quite ancient contracts now and honestly the state of DAOs is not exactly great.

@DrNickA @jito_sol @solana Locked in to ancient contracts? You mean governor contracts? Luckily with a few onchain proposals most could be updated - these aren’t locked in forever, just tricky to change. 

And for the ‘state of DAOs is not exactly great’ disagree so much, we’re seeing more and more DAO

James.eth 🔥_🔥

DAOs will eat the world. Governance & token design @🔥_🔥

🌶️ @metacartel  🐉 @hydra-ventures ✨ PleasrDAO 



Speaking of @drnick he is joining Jito as Head of Governance, signaling a positive shift for Solana’s governance culture.

But @james.eth fires back, urging folks not to be too jaded about Ethereum DAOs. Progress is slow, but real.

https://x.com/blockchainjames/status/1923876957869178951

Bonus take from yours truly on a new proposal to create a Compound Foundation.

It’s sensible enough, but also: why are foundations the default solution for product strategy?

We need growth engines, not nonprofit inertia.

Compound DAO needs firepower to stay competitive—but do we really want a tax-exempt nonprofit leading “product execution”?

We’ve seen this movie before (hi, OpenAI).

DAOs don’t just need governance—they need orgs structured to win. Incentives matter. https://t.co/oVZW47HcCC

Kilgore

Bonus take from yours truly on a new proposal to create a Compound Foundation.

It’s sensible enough, but also: why are foundations the default solution for product strategy?

We need growth engines, not nonprofit inertia. 
https://x.com/0xKilgore/status/1925619847670411411