🔒 Timelock & Execution: Safety Delays
Discover why governance uses delays to prevent malicious proposals
Follow a proposal from draft to execution
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0 / 5 completed⏳ Timelock & Execution: The Safety Delay
The vote passed. But nothing happens yet. There's a mandatory delay before execution: the timelock. Ranges from 1 day (low-risk changes) to 14 days (protocol upgrades). Purpose: give users exit rights. If you disagree with a passed proposal, you have 1-14 days to sell tokens and leave before it executes. Also prevents governance attacks—can't buy tokens → pass malicious vote → execute → dump tokens in same day. During timelock, anyone can inspect the queued transaction. If it's malicious, community can coordinate a fork or guardian multisig can veto. After timelock expires, anyone can trigger execution by calling the smart contract.
🎮 Interactive: Timelock Risk Simulator
Choose proposal risk level and adjust timelock duration. See how security and agility trade off. Longer delays = safer but slower response to crises.
Adequate time for security review and user exit
Slow execution—difficult to respond to emergencies
🔐 Guardian Multisigs: The Emergency Brake
Most DAOs include a guardian multisig—3-of-5 or 5-of-9 trusted addresses that can veto proposals during timelock or emergency pause the protocol. This undermines decentralization but provides critical safety valve.
- • Can stop obvious governance attacks
- • Emergency response to exploits faster than governance
- • Gives community confidence to lock large TVL
- • Centralization risk—5 people override 10,000 voters
- • Guardian capture possible (bribe or coerce multisig)
- • Many DAOs plan to remove guardians after 2-3 years
Compound 2021: Proposal passed to distribute 280k COMP ($80M). Bug discovered during 2-day timelock. No guardian multisig. Community had to execute, drain treasury, vote to return funds. With guardian, could've been vetoed instantly.
⚙️ Execution: Anyone Can Trigger
Once timelock expires, any address can call execute(proposalId) on the Governor contract. Usually bots do it within minutes.
Simple parameter changes: $50-200. Complex multi-call proposals (multiple actions): $500-2000. Caller pays gas but often gets reimbursed by DAO treasury.
The proposal is a series of smart contract calls. Examples: treasury.transfer(recipient, 100k) or protocol.setParameter(newValue). All on-chain and transparent.
💡 Key Insight
Timelocks embody the security vs. agility dilemma in DAO governance. Short timelocks (1-2 days) allow rapid iteration like a startup. Long timelocks (14 days) prevent attacks but make DAOs slower than traditional companies. During 2020 DeFi boom, protocols competed on speed—some had zero timelock. Many got exploited. By 2021, all major protocols added 2-7 day minimum. The meta-lesson: DAOs optimize for security over speed. This is the correct default for protocols managing billions in TVL, but it means DAOs will never be as agile as centralized teams. Trade-off is fundamental. Next section: quiz and key takeaways to test your understanding of the complete proposal lifecycle.