Token governance that actually works with Paul Glavin
Paul Glavin on building governance that respects how humans actually behave
Paul Glavin, founder of Gardens V2, joined Dennison Bertram on the Tally podcast to discuss one of crypto’s most controversial governance mechanisms: veTokens. After four years of running conviction voting in real DAOs, Glavin has strong opinions about what works — and what doesn’t.
Their conversation covers why locking tokens is like trapping people in nightclubs, how Curve and Balancer succeeded despite their governance design, the gap between white paper theory and “trench reality,” and what Glavin would delete from the DAO playbook forever. Plus, the most underrated governance innovation that nobody’s talking about.
If you’ve ever wondered why so many projects copy veTokens despite their obvious flaws, or what governance mechanisms actually respect how humans behave, keep reading.
This newsletter is a summary of Token governance that actually works with Paul Glavin. Listen to the full conversation here.
The nightclub problem
“If you’re marketing a nightclub, you want to prevent people from coming into your club so that people walking by see a line of people who can’t get into your club. You want to manufacture scarcity of the ability to purchase your product and make it seem like people want it more than they actually do. The veToken model is we’re going to take people in the nightclub and we’re going to literally lock them in and that’s going to improve our business somehow because they can’t literally get out so they just have to be there. And it’s obviously not going to work. It’s going to destroy your business.” - Paul Glavin
It’s a blunt metaphor, but it captures the core flaw in one of DeFi’s most copied governance patterns.
“The Gen Z expression for it would be like low T energy. You’re creating tokenomics from the perspective that people don’t want to own your project. That’s not what a successful organization is, that’s not how they think. If you have a really good healthy organization, people want to own your token. They’re excited.” - Paul Glavin
Success despite the mechanism
Curve and Balancer are the go-to examples when teams defend veTokens. Both projects are enormously successful.
“Curve has a steady $3 billion in TVL, it’s earning $40 million a year in revenue. It’s close to $200 million in total revenue. It’s a very healthy, successful project. The token price is an anomaly, it has not performed well as a token, which I think is probably connected to the veToken.” - Paul Glavin
“For these two projects specifically, they don’t need these kinds of gimmicks. It’s really easy to create a healthy economic system when you have a healthy revenue generating platform. Companies have killed for the type of success that Curve and Balancer have, to have that level of revenue with how minimal the expenses are to upkeep those platforms.” - Paul Glavin
They succeeded despite their governance design, not because of it.
“They have succeeded in spite of those challenges that they’ve gone through. I think it’s probably related to the mindset of, what do we do? We’re building something, what do we do? And then the first thing you do is look to well, what do other people do?” - Paul Glavin
What actually works: conviction voting
Gardens has been running conviction voting since before 2021. The mechanism is straightforward: when you support a proposal, your conviction grows over time. Remove support, and it decays at the same rate.
“The simple explanation of conviction voting is that when you support an individual proposal, your conviction grows on your support over time. It starts at zero, eventually it’ll reach the total level of your voting weight in that community or that decision. So you kind of have a time delay in between your support and executability of that support.” - Paul Glavin
“When your support is submitted, everyone in the community is then seeing that support level. Even though no conviction has accumulated yet, you just submitted your support. But now everyone knows where the community support level is at. And you’re effectively looking into the future.” - Paul Glavin
The theory came from Block Science researcher Michael Zargham, who published the concept in 2019 in a paper called Social Sensor Fusion. He theorized time-based protections in governance mechanisms, trying to emulate complex systems seen in electrical engineering and the natural environment.
“The effects of your prior beliefs linger. If you did support a proposal significantly at one point and then took it away, the effects of that prior belief that you supported this proposal are still lingering.” - Paul Glavin
The founder unlock problem
“More often than not the unlock rate for founders and investors is vastly higher than the multiplier that you get from locking your tokens. If somebody says, hey, lock your tokens up for the next four years and you’ll get 10% more, right? Or 20% more. They’re almost always omitting the fact that in the next four years, we’re going to unlock 80% of the supply that goes to the founders and investors. So by the time you even have the opportunity to get your token out of here, it’s almost like leveraging people’s emotions to be like I really love this project so much that I really want the founders and the investors to really get all the value out of this and then when I get out of here, I’ll have 10% more in a market that’s just a 100% larger, or thousands of percent larger.” - Dennison Bertram
Theory versus trench reality
Glavin came to governance through 1Hive, watching theoretical mechanisms meet actual human behavior.
“Then naturally you have this enormous difference between theory and then trench web 3 people actually using the mechanisms. I remember thinking like this, these theories are BS. Like this is just, the world doesn’t work like a white paper. Eventually you do realize how healthy that conflict is. There is like dirty filthy reality, but there still is theory and kind of system engineering that is critical for some of those aspects of the real world to function and actually work appropriately. So I kind of came to fall in love with that polarity of theory versus execution and how different they are, but how important they are for each other too.” - Paul Glavin
Gardens V2 reflects this learning.
“Gardens V1 was an entire platform built around the idea that you would manage an entire treasury with conviction voting. Gardens V2 kind of stepped back from some of the naivety of that and said, okay, DAOs are not going to manage everything with conviction voting.” - Paul Glavin
The most underrated innovation
When asked about the most underrated governance innovation, Glavin pointed to token streaming.
“Streaming tokens is what Superfluid’s doing and what a couple other protocols are doing. I think that’s not being used to the extent in governance token distribution or in allocation of funding from grant programs, for instance. You don’t really consider it because it’s not really like a decision mechanism, but it seems like a missing piece of a lot of really healthy systems.” - Paul Glavin
Building for the long game
The conversation ended with a rapid-fire question: if you could delete one idea from the DAO pantheon forever, what would it be?
“Obviously veTokens I think is something that’s just an easy thing to just nuke and it would not have any negative, it would probably only have positive effects for everyone using it.” - Paul Glavin
His runner-up: non-transferable tokens.
“I think so much of the decentralization and natural evolution cycles of decentralized communities comes from the fact that you’re able to sell or send away your tokens and that new people are able to get them and come on board. So I have trouble seeing how non-transferable tokens get to take advantage of any of the powerful elements of crypto, basically.” - Paul Glavin
“I’ve had trouble seeing where we’re like what you gain from a non-transferable governance weight that you wouldn’t just run with outside of crypto with like a group chat and a Google spreadsheet basically.” - Paul Glavin
Glavin’s work with Gardens proves that token governance doesn’t have to choose between theory and practice. The most successful projects will learn from real human behavior while still applying rigorous system design, building mechanisms that communities can actually use.
Learn more about Gardens
Read Paul’s article It’s Time to Lock veTokens Away Forever
Listen to the full conversation
Ready to launch governance for your token? Reach out.