I briefly present the main ideas and dynamics of WillWe, a fungibility grounded governance paradigm developed over the past few years. For a more incipient version of the same ideas see: WalllaW: A DAO-complete Governance Structure post.
Assumptions
Coins (as in fungible immutable moneys) are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
Organizations are membranes that move forward. What forward is is what governance is for.
Who gives how much for what to whom is of value and of interest to any part of an organization.
Therefore
Resource allocation is the primary governing behaviour. Most contentious, by far.
Allocative, redistributive preferences are alone sufficient for governance.
Fungibility is all you need for governance.
The problem
Without question, the most abundant, least expensive, most underutilized and constantly abused resource in the world today is human ingenuity. The source of that abuse is mechanistic, Industrial Age, hierarchical, domination concepts of organization and the management practices they spawn. (Dee Hock, founder of Visa, n.d.)
The governance problem is that all “DAO”s today use proposal based governance. Proposals are highly skeuomorphic. Proposals are law texts. The people that vote, the delegates, are the representatives of stakeholders, members of a forum, parliament comes to mind. “DAO” governance has mostly just reproduced existing structures. It is stuck in a repertoire of processes that can fit and settle in a filing cabinet, on actual paper, in a representative chamber secretariat. The internet and “the world computer” can do much more than just transpose parliaments. An “internet of value” needs value to be directed and redistributed at the optimal speed of value. Not in increments of plenary sessions. Not by means of long texts, budgets, milestones, KPIs and papercuts.
What I propose is for DAOs to be things, alive things that move, where movement happens the moment it can happen - to the degree its body is actioned by legitimate energy inputs; where contributors do not require pre-approval, where things have real-time, asynchronous commitment-feedback loops, and can foster a pluralist, self-policing governance. Very much so away from the current trend of censorship by means of a veil of professionalization, corporate aesthetics and speek that is starting to dominate most “DAO”s - away from this smuggled appeal to authority not native to our medium.
The solution
If you have a drone that is just constantly flying over the city trying to participate in policing the city, how do you define the set of rules that the drone tries to observe and say “this requires some intervention. We worry the drone will be just observing us and say somebody wants to protest, somebody wants to say no. Whether it’s in a daylight or in the night we can define the systems that will tell all of the surveillance mechanics to say there’s only a very minimal set of rules we all agree on. But then how do you even create the flowing to transition between societies with different set of rules.I think building these AIs that are very independent autonomous verifiable within some broader set. Always responsive to the localized set of desired laws is the way to go.
Any automatic policing system that is being introduced has to be adaptive to the society that it is observing and some kind of really only edge cases lead to disagreements where individuals have the ability to just move away fluently, flow into different legal systems. So if we encode it in a decentralized autonomous verifiable human focused way, also adaptive and also allowing allways to escape or move in those jurisdictions I think it can all work and it can work in this automated AI context.
Tomasz K. Stańczak. @ Zuitzerland 2025 (12:00 - 13:47)
Incentives
“DAO”s typically start with an airdrop and all evolve into the same shape and dynamic of having a pot of gold in the center and wolves circling it. Better join the right pack. Better not challenge the feeding order. So on, so forth. Point being, not that it degenerates or that it necessarily leads to centralization, which it does, but that the cost of governance ends up a lot of times being treated as an externality. Mistake. Big mistake. Governance costs and, I argue, whoever wants to govern should pay for it. Better yet, whoever needs to govern, will pay for it. This changes the dynamics in their entirety. We move from asking otherwise unengaged, dis-interested agents to “come and govern” to making free-riding the most game-theoretic optimal position.
Not quite freeriding. If I hold ETH because I drink the kool-aid, am I free-riding? The answer is yes, I am not contributing to the one-shot-dank-singature-slot efforts, yet, (efficient market hypothesis) I am positioned to benefit from it. But, if the verkle turns sour or proves to be made in a square lab for a round world, I will lose. Simply put, coin holders always have value at stake. The coin is already the pot of gold and its holders are members in an already existing DAO, the coin itself. This, to the same degree the Argentinians are simultaneously members and subjects of the peso, or, more or less everyone is on notice about the Federal Reserve interest rates, even if, in a lot of physical places, USD banknotes are today as useless as BTC. When the agents doing the governing, pay for it, by means of working in a new direction or simply allocating resources, the noise is reduced, so is the governance for the sake of governance.
Moving away from a pot of gold at the center renders questions related to who has a right to what share and for what as nonsensical, it simplifies the picture dramatically. It places the feeding frenzy outside of governance, in the markets, where it belongs. And, since in WillWe you can only govern by paying or by doing work, the noise is reduced and the signals of what the body of the organization needs (over wants) urgently for it to secure its long term survival are amplified. To summarize, there is little incentive to participate in governance unless you are a long term committed stakeholder that has both coin and worldview at stake or, alternatively, are willing to do the work and “be the change” you wish to see in the world and through the body of the coin. This, in a comparable way the Fed chair moves levers to make the USA more or less spendy and employed.
The invention
The invention is first of all remembering that coins are perfect jurisdictions and crypto coin coordination potential has sufficient velocity to escape the bounds of known organizational theory. More tangibly, WillWe makes accessible the type of governance historically exercised by central banks, to everyone that cares to permissionlessly engage in collective sense-making. That is, the primary economic mechanism is capital availability and velocity. Referred to as inflation rates, its use is somewhat unique for onchain governance purposes as the rate of burn of organizations is typically decided by seasonal budgets. The rate of spend here is up to vote at all times and for each node of the token network. The second, is context nesting; which is not an invention at all but something that is of use both in nature and in organizations (projects, departments, “sub-DAOs”). These, organizational metabolism rate and nesting work together to secure censorship resistance, economic consistency and a systematizing order that will hopefully rival any quarterly report known to womankind.
So, all nodes are derived, live and can be observed in the context of the coin. Each node has two balances, a reserve and a supply balance. The reserve is the parent token, that is the immediately higher level economic and political context within which the node exists and the unit of account for its income. The node supply token acts like shares, they are created either by the node’s inflationary needs or by direct 1-to-1 reserve-to-share minting. This makes economic attacks largely untenable while allowing non-member goal targeted contributions as well as permissionless exit. The node shares are what powers node identity, consensus and spend decisions. Node shares, in turn, act as reserve value for subsequent children nodes. To note, all nodes are autonomous and largely independent from their parents.
Nodes can do whatever, but it is reasonable to assume they will do what they claim their existence to be for as their per second funding can be adjusted asynchronously by parent node member(s) value judgement expressions at each block. Same with worker endpoint nodes. You wouldn’t want Vitalik to reduce his allocation preferences to your worker endpoint with no comment and therefore on the implied assumption (rumor/rationalization) your research progress became less timely to the roadmap or simply no longer credible. Again, how much someone gives to whom, for what, is of interest to all members, contributors, stakeholders of an organization. Same applies to the opposite action of taking away or reducing what are otherwise continuous income streams.
The governance mechanisms, allocation, redistribution, the information they produce are computable signals; they can be analyzed, interpreted, summarized and subsumed as they are primarily just related quantities. They make the order easier to scrutinize, emergent ideological categories easier to empirically crystallize, and (unlikely) collusion easier to identify and defend against. AI clients, agents and overlays can do any presumably requested math, “enhance” the view for humans or participate as “politicians”. In short, the police here is not a drone but a smart contract that gives coins (DAOs) the ability to self-order and have a plurality of bodies that act intra-independently to serve the wider encompassing context and its workers.
The shift from paper era devices is quite dramatic; instead of texts made for people to read and express a binary preference on, provided all bureaucratic hurdles are satisfied, we move to a thing that has flows, reflexes and moves as it comprising cells push it to. From abstractions that were invented for when the printed word was the most efficient information dissemination medium, to anarchic, self-aware, algorithmic jurisdictions that act predictably on direct impulse with no ambiguity or noise. A police, a more just and available one, is the product. The mission however is to increase the prevalence of co-interested value and accelerate collaborative potential from it as a defensible protocolized outpost.
The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (1999, p. 29).
Governing Ethereum Onchain
A Policy Issue
The meta-governance problem is that crypto coins are the most successful coordination product and primitive that resulted from the totality of our human efforts. This success is a problem because ethereum thought leadership is actively repressing this version of reality. You don’t get modern, scaled societies without money. You also can’t get resilient, self-sustaining and decentralized public infrastructures without coins. Things that are alive, like the ethereum network is, eat. Staying alive and simultaneously credibly neutral requires energy inputs. In all economies of scale this function is served by fungible units of value. Why our ecosystem’s high priests chose to banish public goods that aim to be self-resilient from funding is hard for me to comprehend.
The Infinite Garden of the World Computer
WETH is a coin. It is a DAO. It can be used to incentivise community engagement or better yet, as I have argued against that, used to understand what the pain points of the Ethereum’s body are. The Foundation can keep funding whatever it is funding. But by using WillWe, its priorities and their order become knowable. Other WETH holders would then be able to support this order, or alter it by modifying the speed at which its proposed outputs are likely to materialize. New surprising self-funded priorities could emerge. New teams could get funded. All of it in a simple value flow order that is amenable to intuitive summary. Only then will the ethereum roadmap be legible, fit and ready for the 21st century prime time - the toilet seat attention slot.
In practice
Hopefully. I have created a node in the WETH token network. Create your own endpoint in its context, post in the chat or create an entire new node describing what are you doing to make the Ethereum Foundation change their posturing relative to banning from grants projects that plan to have a token and therefore signaing to the entire body that coin-making is an unpalleatable activity. This new mission of WETH currently has a total energy potential of 0.0036 WETH made available over the next ~8 days. Emailing the EF, writing, being a nuissance with kind demeanor on public forums about it will qualify as meaningful contribution and rewarded per second with share of the pool.
References
Hock, D. (n.d.). Leading and following. Dee Hock. MANAGING,LEADING, AND FOLLOWING - Dee W Hock
Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (J. Rose, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
