The exchange theory of web3 governance (or ‘blockchains without romance’)

Blockchains have enabled innovation in distributed economic institutions, such as money (e.g. cryptocurrencies) and markets (e.g. DEXs), but also innovations in distributed governance, such as DAOs, and new forms of collective choice. Yet we still lack a general theory of blockchain governance. James Buchanan once described public choice theory as ‘politics without romance’ and argued instead for an exchange theory of politics. Following Buchanan, we argue here for an exchange view of blockchain governance. The ‘romantic’ view of blockchain governance is collective choice and consensus through community voting. The exchange view, instead, is focused on entrepreneurial discovery of opportunities for value creation in governance space through innovation in protocols (e.g. Curve, Convex, Lido, Metagov, etc) that facilitate exchange of coordination and voting rights, that are newly made possible through tools that enable pseudonymous, composable and permissionless governance actions. The exchange lens on web3 governance also helps illuminate how this emergent polycentric process can generate robustness in decentralised systems