Coins, Tokens & Crypto Assets
A vote for every token. Not a vote for every holder.
Hold a governance token and you can vote on fees, upgrades and treasury spending. The weight comes from the balance, not from the head count — which can hand decisions to a wide community, or to three wallets.
The problem
One proposal. Three ways to count the same vote.
Nobody changes their mind and nobody changes the text. Only the counting rule changes — and the proposal changes sides.
Proposal: raise the protocol fee
NOT COUNTED YETInvented wallets, invented balances, an invented proposal. No real protocol, no real vote and no real outcome is being described — the numbers exist only so the counting rule is visible.
The proposal is on the table and the balances are above. Press Count it one holder, one vote.
Nothing about the proposal changed between those two counts — only the rule for assigning weight. Crypto governance is almost always capital-weighted: one token, one vote, rather than one person, one vote. That is genuinely open — anyone can acquire the token and get a say — and it is not equal, because the supply is not equally held. Large holders, funds, exchanges and early investors can carry far more weight than everybody else combined.
Turnout is where the idea gets thin. Many holders never vote: they do not follow proposals, do not understand them, or have delegated their weight elsewhere. Once only the wallets that showed up are counted, the three largest are not merely the biggest bloc — they are most of the electorate. “Decentralised governance” and “three wallets decide” can describe the same vote at the same moment, and neither description is wrong.
It cuts the other way too. Spread the same supply across the 85 small wallets instead, and the same mechanism hands the decision to the many rather than the few — the token is a tool, not a verdict. Which is why the useful questions about a governance token are how the supply is distributed, how many wallets actually vote, and how much weight sits with a handful of delegates — not what the vote is worth.
The definition
Three things a governance token really is.
Tap each card for the mechanism underneath.
Hands on
What is actually on the ballot?
Holders can support or reject proposals. Tap each item and see whether governance decides it — or whether it was never governance’s to decide.
Protocol fee levels
GOVERNANCE DECIDESGovernance steers the protocol, not the market it trades in.
The bridge
Four things that decide how much a vote is worth.
Two mechanisms that widen the circle, and two that narrow it again.
A governance token is influence over a system — which can be worth a great deal when the protocol is large and strategically important, and guarantees nothing about the token economically. Next comes a token type that is not trying to steer anything at all, only to stay still: stablecoins.
Check yourself
Five questions.
Answers come straight from this lesson. Submitting completes it.