The Meta

Governance participation is still too low.

Effective onchain governance is vital to the long-term success & viability of community governed protocols. The current era of onchain governance is defined by, for better or worse, the rate of participation in protocol governance. Today we’re diving into a few key trends affecting governance tokens & how protocols can take advantage of innovations from Hedgey Finance, Tally, & Wormhole to remedy downtrends in community participation.

The Obstacles

Apathy

Governance apathy is not unique to the onchain ecosystem. Governance in all its forms is ultimately defined by the rate of participation of its constituents. The problem is often chalked up as unsolvable, an issue defined by the difficulty of harnessing human attention in an era of fragmented mindshare. Onchain infrastructure is uniquely positioned to address apathy & protocols must align governance efforts to prioritize community engagement.

Chain fragmentation

The future is multichain & the future is now. Gone are the days where protocol governance resides exclusively on Ethereum. As users begin to adopt, grow, and participate across multiple chains, governance must adapt. Expecting users to participate on chains that are financially or technically prohibitive is a recipe for governance failure.

Investor Lockups

A large portion of token supply remains idle & unable to participate in governance during investor lockup periods (vesting). Enabling dormant tokens to participate in governance is the key to unlocking large swaths of potential governance participants.

Hedgey <> Wormhole <> Tally

Wormhole is the leading interoperability platform powering multichain applications and bridges at scale. The Wormhole DAO is set to launch onchain governance in the coming weeks & is building in tandem with Hedgey & Tally to create a lasting, involved community of Wormhole DAO governance participants. Wormhole is employing innovations like MultiGov™ & Hedgey’s investor lockup product to ensure the long-term success of its protocol governance.

MultiGov™

Wormhole & Tally are developing MultiGov™: an industry-first multichain governance solution directly addressing the key issues plaguing apathy & chain fragmentation.

“MultiGov™ lets DAOs meet token holders where they are. DAO members can govern an onchain DAO from any chain, regardless of the chain the protocol is deployed on. MultiGov™ *supports DAOs on Solana, Ethereum and EVM-compatible L2s. Multichain DAOs will lower barriers to participation and reach users everywhere.”*Read the full whitepaper here.

Hedgey

Hedgey’s investor lockup product enables Wormhole to distribute programmatically locked tokens to investors while maintaining the ability for the locked tokens to still participate in delegation and onchain governance. Lockup recipients delegate voting power to active Wormhole contributors, increasing the pool of voting power participating in governance while still ensuring tokens are programmatically released to investors on a predefined schedule.

Read more here.

Tally

The Tally team remains committed to supporting protocol governance & is actively building solutions to the key problems facing DAOs. Supporting innovations like Hedgey’s investor lockup product & MultiGov™ provides protocol’s with best in class products to support & grow a community of active governance participants. Tally is where protocols govern & is excited to continue to support the most important protocols in the ecosystem.

This article is written in collaboration with Hedgey Finance, Tally, & Wormhole.

To learn more & stay updated follow the contributors on X.