A Vote — The One I Still Think About
In late 2021, I was part of Index Coop — one of the more serious DAOs at the time, with a real treasury, working groups, and something that genuinely felt like governance in practice. I was proposing an APAC Working Group. An experiment, really. A bet that the space needed more Southeast Asian voices building inside it, not just watching from the outside.
The proposal made it to vote. The budget was agreed. And then, almost immediately, the conversation shifted to my remuneration.
One person raised a question about what I was getting. That question became a rallying point. Others joined. What started as a governance discussion turned into something more uncomfortable — the kind of social pressure that doesn't show up in tokenomics models but is very real in a Discord server at midnight.
I gave up part of the remuneration. The working group launched, didn't stick, and was eventually phased out when Index Coop moved to a new structure anyway.
I've thought about that moment more than I probably should. Not out of resentment. More like — it was the first time I saw, up close, how a room full of people with shared ideals could produce an outcome that served none of them.
A Framework — For What Was Actually Happening
There's a philosopher named James Carse who wrote a slim, strange book called Finite and Infinite Games . The core idea is deceptively simple: a finite game is played to win. An infinite game is played to keep playing.
Sports, elections, job interviews — finite. A culture, a language, a living ecosystem — infinite. The goal of the infinite game isn't to defeat anyone. It's to keep the game alive and bring more people into it.
DAOs were designed as infinite games. The whole architecture — decentralised governance, shared treasuries, community ownership of protocol direction — was built on the assumption that participants would play for the long horizon. For the mission. For the thing being built.
But Carse also noted something that I've since seen borne out in practice: a finite game can exist inside an infinite one. But an infinite game cannot survive inside a finite one. If enough players are playing to win — to extract, to exit, to optimise for their own outcome — the infinite structure buckles under the weight of it.
This isn't a moral judgement. It's a structural observation.
A Pattern — Not a Bug
Governance platforms like Snapshot, which run most DAO voting, consistently see participation rates below 5% of eligible voters. In many of the largest DAOs, fewer than ten addresses control more than half the voting power.
You can frame this as failure. Or you can read it as something more honest: rational behaviour in a system that didn't account for it.
In game theory, this is a Nash equilibrium. Everyone acts in their own interest. The collective outcome is worse for everyone. Nobody broke the rules. Nobody cheated. The system just produced a result that the idealists didn't want, because the incentives pointed somewhere else.
I played this game too. Not with governance votes — but during the bear, with a memecoin cycle. I was early to Pepe. Genuinely early. Took profit along the way, averaged something around 50x on my initial. Felt vindicated. Then spent heavily on NFTs, got caught in an OTC scam, and lost a Milady that had cost me around $7,000.
I'm not sharing this to be confessional. I'm sharing it because it's the same pattern. I understood the game intellectually — and then played the finite version anyway. Extracted instead of compounded. Optimised for the exit instead of the ecosystem.
People are people. Including, sometimes, me.
A Tension — Between Hardin and the Undercurrent
There's a 1968 paper by Garrett Hardin called "The Tragedy of the Commons." The argument is bleak but logical: shared resources, left to rational self-interested actors, will always be depleted. Everyone grazes one more cow on the common pasture. Eventually, the pasture dies.
For a long time, this felt like the definitive read on what was happening in crypto. Shared treasuries drained. Governance captured. Mercenary liquidity pulling out the moment yields dropped.
But there's a counter to Hardin that I keep returning to. Elinor Ostrom — economist, Nobel laureate — spent decades studying communities that did manage shared resources sustainably. Swiss alpine villages. Philippine irrigation systems. Japanese fishing cooperatives. Her conclusion: the tragedy of the commons is real, but it is not inevitable. The conditions under which coordination succeeds are specific, designable, and learnable.
The failure, in other words, isn't in human nature. It's in the architecture.
I think about this when people write off the DAO experiment entirely. The idealism wasn't wrong. The design was premature. It assumed infinite-game players in a world whose systems overwhelmingly produce finite ones — not out of malice, but because the incentive structures most of us grew up inside rewarded extraction over stewardship.
The undercurrent is still there, though. The people who stayed. The ones building with intention rather than expectation.
They're just quieter than the noise.
A Design — What Comes After Idealism
The most interesting thing about working in RWA tokenisation right now is how deliberately un-idealistic the infrastructure feels — and how that's actually a feature.
Real-world asset tokenisation doesn't ask participants to believe in decentralisation as a philosophy. It asks them to recognise that programmable, onchain settlement of real assets is more efficient than what exists today. That's a finite-player argument. And it works.
What Ostrom understood — and what the best builders in this cycle seem to be internalising — is that sustainable coordination doesn't require everyone to be an idealist. It requires architecture that makes cooperation the most rational choice, even for the finite player. Incentives aligned not to ideology, but to observable behaviour and its consequences.
Token launches are the clearest illustration. Most fail because they're designed around an infinite-game narrative and deployed into a finite-game market. The few that have worked recently — Hyperliquid's HYPE being the most visible — succeeded in part because years of demonstrated utility preceded any token. When the token arrived, the finite players entered a game whose terms the infinite players had already set.
That sequencing matters more than the market wants to admit.
A Reflection — People, Still
I don't think the answer to coordination failure is better humans. I've made peace with that.
What I think is possible — and what I find myself genuinely hopeful about, without forcing it — is better design. Systems that don't require everyone to be long-horizon thinkers to produce long-horizon outcomes. Architecture that channels the finite game into something larger than itself.
It won't solve everything. People will still play the short game. Communities will still fracture. There will be more meme cycles, more exits, more $7,000 mistakes.
But the undercurrent persists. The people who stayed, who kept building, who understood that the infrastructure being laid was real even when the narrative wasn't — they're still here.
And the world, slowly, is starting to ask the questions they've been sitting with for years.
People are people. That's not resignation.
It might just be the beginning of an honest design process.
IN.
Previously — The Cost of Being Early