Not only fund the "products" , but also "management" side!
Tools are neutral — people aren’t. A DAO can technically vote itself into self-sabotage if governance is hijacked by misinformation or insider collusion.
Tools are neutral — people aren’t. A DAO can technically vote itself into self-sabotage if governance is hijacked by misinformation or insider collusion. Voting systems still require a strong, value-aligned community.
The SNS voting function is a powerful evolution for digital governance, offering a transparent and decentralized way to align project decisions with stakeholder interests.
But just like any governance tool, its success hinges on human factors: community education, voting culture, and incentive design.
Most DAOs (especially in early stages) focus their budgets on:
Funding product development.
Paying for marketing.
Growing community size.
But they forget to fund the DAO's "internal operations" — like:
Auditors or review committees.
Transparency tools (dashboards, trackers, metrics).
Legal or financial advisors for complex situations.
Without this, even with the best voting system:
Vote passes → Funds go out → No capacity to check if the job gets done.
A healthy DAO should function more like a real organization:
Real World Company
Board of Directors
Internal Audit Team
CFO/Controllers
Investor Relations
DAO Equivalent
Token Hoders / DAO
Community-elected auditors
Treasury management committee
Transparency working groups
Since most early-stage projects are run by small teams with limited budgets, and it’s often unrealistic to build a full governance structure from day one.
In these cases, DAOs can start by:
Encouraging the community to form volunteer audit or review groups.
Setting clear milestones where the governance budget will grow along with the project scale.
Good governance doesn’t have to be perfect on day one, but it should be part of the roadmap. Without it, decentralization is only a slogan — not a safeguard.
If we only fund the "products" and not the "management" side, our governance will always stay weak — and the project teams can mismanage with little consequence.
A DAO without a governance budget is like a company without a management team. It can release funds, but it can’t enforce or monitor what happens next — leaving the community and token value exposed.
Meanwhile, without strong identity mechanisms, wealthy actors can accumulate tokens to influence governance unfairly (similar to hostile takeovers in public companies).
The Core Conflict
Blockchains are designed for transparency of transactions.
DAOs rely on token-weighted voting.
Privacy advocates want personal identity to stay hidden.
Although On-chain patterns (accumulation, voting collusion) are traceable, without some level of identity traceability, any rich actor (or colluding group) can:
Quietly accumulate enough tokens.
Vote as a "decentralized" community.
In reality, centralize power (hostile takeover).
Many DAOs, including future SNS-based ones, are watching developments in Decentralized Identifiers (DID) systems.
This lets people:
Prove they're unique.
Avoid revealing real-world identity.
Still protect against Sybil attacks and hostile takeovers.
When combined with wallet-based voting, DIDs could flag when one real-world actor is hiding behind many addresses.
Many early-stage challenges encourage to see active community discussions and continuous technical improvements shaping its future. While the road is still rough, the spirit of decentralized governance is thriving, and we look forward to watching both the tooling and practices mature over time.