🤝 Delegation: Vote by Proxy
Discover how token holders delegate voting power to experts
Participate in decentralized governance decisions
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0 / 5 completed🤝 Delegation: How Small Holders Gain Power
Most token holders don't vote. Delegation lets you lend your voting power to active participants—you keep tokens, they vote with your weight. This creates professional delegates who specialize in governance. UNI has 12,000 delegates controlling 40% of voting power. It solves apathy but creates new elites. You can revoke delegation anytime (on-chain transaction).
🎮 Interactive: Delegation Decision Simulator
You hold 1,000 governance tokens. Choose how to use your voting power and see the impact on your influence.
Vote Yourself
You vote directly on every proposal
✅ Advantages
- • Full control
- • Direct voice
- • No middleman
- • Aligned with your views
❌ Disadvantages
- • Time intensive
- • Need expertise
- • Must research proposals
- • Limited power alone
👥 The Rise of Professional Delegates
Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, Jump Crypto. They control millions in delegated votes. Paid teams analyze every proposal. Dominate UNI, COMP, ENS governance.
Flipside Crypto, Gauntlet. Provide data-driven voting. Publish research on impact. Get delegated for expertise. Monetize through consulting.
Active DAO members with reputation. GFX Labs, Penn Blockchain. Vote transparently, explain reasoning. Bridge between community and whales.
Optimism, Arbitrum pay delegates stipends ($20-100k/year). Full-time governance work. Professionalization of DAO participation. Controversy: should voting be paid?
⚠️ Delegation Risks
Delegation was meant to increase participation, but now top 100 delegates control 80%+ of active voting power in major DAOs. Power concentrates in hands of professionals. Is this still decentralized?
Delegates may vote against delegators' interests. No binding agreements. A16z voted to increase fees in UNI (benefiting VCs), community disagreed. You can redelegate but requires active monitoring.
Large delegates coordinate off-chain. "Delegate rings" vote as blocs. Juno Network: whales formed cartel to pass favorable proposals. Hard to detect, harder to stop.
💡 Key Insight
Delegation is a double-edged sword. It solves the participation problem—small holders no longer wasted. But it creates governance elites: professional delegates with massive power. Uniswap: 40% of voting power held by just 12k delegates (out of 3M+ holders). This looks like representative democracy, but without elections, term limits, or accountability mechanisms. You can redelegate anytime, but how many actually monitor their delegate's votes? Most "set and forget." Delegation democratizes access but aristocratizes control. The result: DAOs governed by ~100 professional participants, not millions of token holders. Is that decentralized? You decide.