Original Title: 6 Decentralized Governance Trends for 2025
Original Author: Andrew Hall, A16Z
Original Source: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/6-decentralized-governance-trends-for-2025/
Translation: Tom, Mars Finance
Six Major Decentralized Governance Trends: Outlook for 2025
As the online world becomes increasingly important in our lives, the key collective decisions we need to make online will also increase. For this reason, 2025 is worth looking forward to in the field of decentralized governance: DAOs will continue to explore new ways for anonymous token holders to govern collectively; at the same time, large institutions like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard are trying to encourage more customer participation in online shareholder voting; AI companies like Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI are using citizens' assemblies to set usage rules for large language models (LLMs).
In this strong momentum, here are some themes that I will continue to focus on and participate in next year.
1. Websites that assist with delegated voting
Theme Background: Delegated voting is crucial for online governance, but how to enable voters to wisely choose their delegates remains a challenge. Research shows that user-friendly delegated voting websites can increase participation rates by over 20%, but when there are many delegates to choose from (which is a good phenomenon), how to present this information without further concentrating power becomes critical. Currently, we are still uncertain about the best way to present information and who should be responsible for such an important display. The year 2025 will be significant for exploring how to present delegated information and track its impact.
2. AI assisting with voting delegation
Theme Background: Can AI agents help users find voting delegates that align with their viewpoints? Perhaps users can have conversations with AI agents, answering questions about personal values and goals; the AI agent would then review the voting records, declarations, proposal contents, and forum discussions of the delegates to determine which delegate is most suitable. With the acceleration of generative AI competitions, 2025 will be an excellent experimental period for the intersection of AI and governance, which is exciting.
3. AI as a delegate
Theme Background: A more radical idea is whether we can develop AI agents that understand user preferences and can vote on behalf of users. Can they engage in discussions with other AI agents in forums and even co-write proposals? The true AI delegate may still be a distant reality, but next year is a good time to explore this model.
4. Smarter participation incentives
Theme Background: Experience and research indicate that merely providing one-time airdrop rewards is often insufficient to guide people toward long-term, deep participation in decentralized projects. In 2025, we will see more interesting explorations in 'beyond airdrops.' If a project itself needs to incentivize activities with clear economic value (such as trading), direct subsidies can be used; if a project wants to encourage harder-to-measure behaviors, it may consider longer-term incentive mechanisms, such as repeated rewards combined with time locks.
5. Better funding schemes for public goods
Theme Background: Many projects require community members to help build the ecosystem. However, the current funding and retroactive rewards methods often fail to effectively encourage high-risk, high-reward ideas: members are more inclined to choose projects with a higher chance of success that can obtain funding, rather than those they truly believe in. A reasonable approach is to explore a venture capital-like model for public goods, providing ample initial funding for projects, and once the community recognizes the project's success, offering higher returns. The year 2025 may become a 'launch year' for such innovative funding schemes.
6. More experiments with sortition
Theme Background: AI companies like Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI have explored using sortition to determine AI usage rules. Sortition refers to randomly selecting a subset of users to participate in structured discussions to form collective decision-making recommendations. Similar experiments also exist in Web3. However, to truly test the feasibility of sortition, these citizens' assemblies need to have substantive decision-making power, not just make suggestions, and observe the effectiveness of their resolutions. However, for many significant issues, we need representatives or token holders to conduct in-depth research and continuous iterations; such issues are not suitable for 'one-time' sampling meetings (as these meetings disband upon completion of discussion). Next year, we will also observe how far sortition can go.
Author Biography
Andrew Hall is a professor of political economy at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and the Department of Political Science. He works at the a16z research lab and serves as an advisor to tech companies, startups, and blockchain protocols, focusing on the intersection of technology, governance, and society.