#baby $BABY Most discussions about decentralisation focus on who has power. I’m starting to think the more important question is who ends up using it.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Imagine a neighbourhood where every resident has a key to the community hall. On paper, everyone has equal access. But if only a handful of people ever show up to meetings, the building gradually starts reflecting their priorities. Nobody stole the keys. Most people simply stopped using them.
That’s the lens I ended up viewing Babylon through.
Its Bitcoin security model deliberately refuses to hide certain forms of friction because those delays are part of preserving Bitcoin’s trust assumptions. Yet its governance makes the opposite compromise. If a @BabylonLabs_io holder doesn’t vote, their validator does it for them. The protocol chooses continuity over waiting for universal participation.
The trade-off isn’t just about validator influence. It’s about changing what “ownership” means. Holding governance power becomes less important than consistently exercising it. Over time, influence belongs not to the largest group, but to the group willing to pay attention.
That makes me wonder whether governance is less an economic system than an attention market. Tokens may determine who can shape a protocol, but attention determines who actually does. If that’s true, decentralisation may have less to do with token distribution than with whether the protocol continuously pulls decision-making back to its users or quietly lets it drift towards the people who never stop watching.
I think that’s a much harder problem than building secure infrastructure. Cryptography can distribute authority. It can’t distribute attention.
So when we evaluate governance, should we be asking where voting power starts, or where it naturally accumulates after years of human behaviour?
$ETH
Those aren’t the same thing.
Imagine a neighbourhood where every resident has a key to the community hall. On paper, everyone has equal access. But if only a handful of people ever show up to meetings, the building gradually starts reflecting their priorities. Nobody stole the keys. Most people simply stopped using them.
That’s the lens I ended up viewing Babylon through.
Its Bitcoin security model deliberately refuses to hide certain forms of friction because those delays are part of preserving Bitcoin’s trust assumptions. Yet its governance makes the opposite compromise. If a @BabylonLabs_io holder doesn’t vote, their validator does it for them. The protocol chooses continuity over waiting for universal participation.
The trade-off isn’t just about validator influence. It’s about changing what “ownership” means. Holding governance power becomes less important than consistently exercising it. Over time, influence belongs not to the largest group, but to the group willing to pay attention.
That makes me wonder whether governance is less an economic system than an attention market. Tokens may determine who can shape a protocol, but attention determines who actually does. If that’s true, decentralisation may have less to do with token distribution than with whether the protocol continuously pulls decision-making back to its users or quietly lets it drift towards the people who never stop watching.
I think that’s a much harder problem than building secure infrastructure. Cryptography can distribute authority. It can’t distribute attention.
So when we evaluate governance, should we be asking where voting power starts, or where it naturally accumulates after years of human behaviour?
$ETH