Except this: the composite has been hovering inside a 0.04-point band for two weeks. Stability at the index level usually means motion underneath — and this week, the motion is concentrated in two places. Single-DAO movers, and the question of who actually decides.

DGI Composite — 5.93 (+0.01)

HPR   9.14    Human Participation Rate
DEI   2.78    Delegate Engagement Index
PDI   4.87    Power Dynamics Index
GPI   5.30    Grassroots Participation Index

HPR is structurally pinned near 10 — wallets are mostly real humans, that part of the system works. The drag is DEI at 2.78. Across 35 qualified DAOs, the people delegated to vote are not voting at the rate the design assumes. Same story as last week. Same story as the week before.

Sub-indices

Infrastructure on top again. Social on the bottom again. The shape of the cohort is not what changes week to week — what changes is which DAOs in it are doing something.

Movers

Up

Gitcoin is the standout. +0.61 in seven days, driven by DEI climbing to 5.07. Real delegate activity, not a metric artifact. Worth watching whether this is the start of a regime shift or one good week.

Lido continues its slow climb — Dual Governance keeps showing up in the data, edition after edition.

Down

Safe leads the loss column. DEI at 0.62 — delegates are not engaging despite a high HPR floor. Uniswap drops below 6 again, the third time this quarter.

The concentration question

Composite movements get the headlines. The question that does not move week-to-week — and probably should — is how many people actually decide what happens in any given DAO.

Here is what the latest delegate snapshots show across the six DAOs where we track ranked top delegates. Read this carefully, the sample sizes differ:

Top-20 sample (concentration in the upper layer)

Top-100 sample (deeper field, lower concentration by construction)

The numbers are not comparable across the two groups — the top-100 cohorts dilute the share of the top by definition. What matters is the within-group reading.

Within the top-20 group, Wormhole and Aave concentrate two-thirds of the visible voting power into five addresses. Wormhole at least has delegation depth behind it: rank 1 has 1,285 delegators, rank 2 has 21,889. There are people backing the position.

Aave's top five together carry roughly 5.2M AAVE — and somewhere on the order of 50 delegators behind them combined. Not 50,000. Not 5,000. Around fifty wallets supplying the legitimacy for a third of the engaged voting layer.

Within the top-100 group, Arbitrum and ENS look almost identical — ~44% of the tracked voting power sitting in the top ten. That is not a flat field either, but it is a different kind of concentration: distributed across more named participants, with broader (if imperfect) delegation backing.

Both pictures are real. Both matter. The DGI scores them differently — and that difference shows up in PDI, where Aave sits at 4.04 and Arbitrum at 4.96.

This is the layer the GVS framework was built to surface. More on the structural side of it — and how DIG (DAO Influence Graph) makes coalition behavior visible beyond raw voting power — coming in May.

What we are watching next week

• Whether Gitcoin's +0.61 is a single-edition spike or the front edge of a trend

• Whether Safe's DEI reverses or settles below 1.0

• The first DIG-driven look at concentration that goes beyond rank tables

DGI Weekly publishes every Sunday at paragraph.com/@chainsights. Full DAO Matrix — free, no account required: chainsights.one

Methodology note. Top-20 vs Top-100 sample sizes reflect adapter coverage per DAO (Tally / Agora / Boardroom / Subgraph). Concentration percentages are calculated against the tracked sample, not total token supply. Full methodology: https://chainsights.one/rankings/methodology.

The index held steady this week. Across 32 tracked DAOs, the DGI Composite came in at 5.92 — unchanged from last week's 5.92. The headline number masks a week of meaningful movement underneath: two DAOs swung by more than 0.80 in opposite directions, and the mid-tier saw notable compression.

Top 5 This Week

Aavegotchi holds the top position for a second consecutive week with a 7.74 — the only DAO above 7.5 in the current index. Arbitrum slipped slightly from 7.51 to 7.31 but retains its position as the strongest of the major governance DAOs. Redbelly Network continues its quiet climb, now consistently in the top 3.

Biggest Mover: Olympus DAO +0.83

The standout this week is Olympus DAO, which jumped from 5.68 to 6.51 — the largest single-week gain in the current index. The improvement is driven primarily by PDI (Proposal Deliberation Index) and GPI (Governance Process Index), suggesting a period of increased delegate engagement and broader participation. Whether this reflects a structural shift or a one-week spike is the question to watch in the coming editions.

Biggest Drop: Parallel −0.81

Parallel recorded the sharpest decline this week, falling from 6.53 to 5.72. Last week Parallel was inside the top 10 — this week it has dropped to the lower half of the mid-tier. The decline is concentrated in the DEI (Decentralization Index) component, pointing toward increased voting power concentration among a smaller set of delegates.

Also notable:

• StakeDAO −0.65 (7.30 → 6.65): dropped from 4th to 8th place

• Lido −0.36 (7.08 → 6.72): the second-largest TVL protocol in the index continues a gradual downward trend

• Arbitrum −0.20 (7.51 → 7.31): minor but consistent with the post-LobbyFi governance discussion

The Participation Illusion: Still Present

One pattern persists across this week's snapshot: HPR (Human Participation Rate) is 10.0 for 28 of 32 tracked DAOs. Wallets are showing up. The differentiation between DAOs now happens almost entirely in DEI, PDI, and GPI — the delegate quality and power distribution dimensions.

This is the accountability gap in data form. Broad participation doesn't produce broad governance quality when voting power is concentrated in a small delegate tier. The DAOs at the bottom of this week's index — Compound 5.53, Morpho 5.51, SushiSwap 5.47 — all have HPR near 10.0. The problem isn't that people aren't voting. It's that the votes that matter are controlled by very few.

30-Day Trends Worth Watching

• Lido: three consecutive weeks of decline. From 7.08 four weeks ago, now 6.72. Not a crisis — but a trend.

• Olympus DAO: largest single-week gain in recent history. Watch for reversal.

• Redbelly Network: quiet and consistent top-3 presence. Underreported.

• ENS: flat at 5.95 for two consecutive weeks. DEI remains the structural weakness (1.38/10) — consistent with the delegate concentration data we've been tracking separately.

Dataset & Methodology

Source: ChainSights API (chainsights.one) Tracked DAOs: 32 (active governance, sufficient snapshot data) Scoring: GVS = HPR (35%) + DEI (25%) + PDI (20%) + GPI (20%) Snapshot date: April 19, 2026

Full methodology: chainsights.one/rankings/methodology

Part of the ongoing ChainSights governance research series. The DAO Influence Graph (DIG) is now live — explore delegation flows and power concentration at chainsights.one

The Headline Number

The DGI Composite fell from 5.93 to 5.74 — a decline of 0.19 points week-over-week. On the surface, that reads as a slowdown. But anyone focused solely on the composite missed the most interesting development of the week.

Two DAOs Just Woke Up

Optimism and Wormhole posted movements this week that are rare in governance analytics.

Optimism gained +3.87 points, now sitting at 7.12. That is not a normal weekly fluctuation — that is a governance system coming back online after a quiet stretch. Optimism enters the top five of the full index for the first time.

Wormhole follows with +3.15 points, reaching 6.91. Crosschain infrastructure, renewed delegate engagement, and a score that now approaches Arbitrum territory.

Both DAOs had been notably quiet in recent weeks. Jumps of this magnitude don't come from a single proposal passing. They signal that multiple governance dimensions improved simultaneously — participation, delegate activity, and power distribution all moving in the same direction at once.

That is the real story of this week.

Who Else Moved

Three additional DAOs with notable weekly movements:

ApeCoin +2.81 → 6.06. Long stuck in the middle of the index, now above the 6-point threshold.

Safe +2.80 → 6.05. A second infrastructure-sector name joining Optimism and Wormhole — a pattern worth watching.

Bancor +2.70 → 6.03. A DeFi original with a meaningful recovery.

On the other side: Arbitrum lost 0.28 points to 7.51, holding a stable second place. ShapeShift declined 0.27 to 6.57.

The 30-Day View

The picture looks different over a longer window.

Biggest Gainers (30 days)

• 1inch Network: +1.32 → 6.9

• Arbitrum: +1.12 → 7.5

• StakeDAO: +0.49 → 7.3

Biggest Decliners (30 days)

• CoW DAO: −1.07 → 5.7

• Superfluid: −0.83 → 6.5

• AladinDAO: −0.73 → 2.8

CoW DAO and Superfluid both had stronger months behind them. Whether this is temporary weakness or the beginning of a trend is something the next few editions will clarify.

Category Snapshot

DeFi remains at the top. Infrastructure is the category to watch — the Optimism and Wormhole movements haven't fully propagated into the category average yet. That should shift over the coming snapshots.

Top 5 This Week

Aavegotchi remains the benchmark. Optimism entering the top five — with one of the largest weekly gains in DGI history — is the defining data point of Edition #4.

What the DGI Measures

The DAO Governance Index is an equal-weighted average of Governance Vitality Scores across all qualifying DAOs. Each GVS is composed of four metrics:

• HPR (35%) — Human Participation Rate: the share of votes coming from verified humans, not Sybil wallets

• DEI (25%) — Delegate Engagement Index: quality and consistency of delegate participation

• PDI (20%) — Power Dynamics Index: concentration of governance power

• GPI (20%) — Grassroots Participation Index: breadth of participation beyond top delegates

This edition is based on snapshot data from April 12, 2026. 37 DAOs met the qualification threshold this week.

DGI Weekly publishes every Sunday at paragraph.com/@chainsights. Full DAO Matrix — free, no account required: chainsights.one

DGI Composite holds at 5.93 — up 0.02 from last week. Stable, slightly positive. Nothing dramatic.

Except for one number that stops you cold: 1inch Network, DEI 8.1.

In a dataset where Compound scores 0.3, Uniswap 2.1, and Arbitrum 2.8 on delegate engagement — 1inch's registered delegates show up at 8.1 out of 10. Consistently. Week after week.

That's not an anomaly. That's a governance culture.

This Week's Numbers

Top Movers — Last 30 Days

🟢 Biggest Gainers

• 1inch Network +1.31 → 7.2

• ShapeShift +0.73 → 7.0

• Redbelly Network +0.73 → 7.3

🔴 Biggest Decliners

• Morpho -0.94 → 5.5

• AladdinDAO -0.73 → 2.8

• Superfluid -0.72 → 6.7

The 1inch Question

Last week we asked: if Compound's delegates score 0.3, why not replace them with an AI agent?

This week's data gives us the other side of that question: what does a DAO look like when humans actually show up?

1inch has DEI 8.1 — the highest delegate engagement score in our entire 53-DAO universe. Their GVS jumped +1.31 in 30 days, now sitting at 7.2. Their HPR is perfect at 10.0 — real humans, not bots. Their GPI (grassroots participation) is 4.5 — below average, meaning small holders are less active. But the delegates? They're doing their job.

The contrast is stark:

1inch proves delegate engagement at scale is possible. The question is: what are they doing differently?

The honest answer: we don't know yet. But it's the most important governance research question in this dataset right now.

Morpho: The Fastest Decline

On the other end: Morpho dropped -0.94 in 30 days, now at 5.5. Their DEI sits at 0.9 — delegates barely present. For a lending protocol managing significant TVL, governance disengagement isn't just a metric problem. It's a risk surface.

AladdinDAO at 2.8 GVS with 0.0 HPR is functionally ungoverned at this point.

The Structural Pattern This Week

For the third consecutive edition, the same pattern holds: HPR is high everywhere, DEI is low almost everywhere.

Of 53 DAOs tracked, only 4 score above 5.0 on DEI: 1inch (8.1), Optimism (6.4), Lido (6.0), Parallel (6.7). Everyone else is below the midpoint — including protocols managing billions in assets.

Human participation is not the problem. Delegate accountability is.

For contact reach out to hello@chainsights.one.

Next Week

We're watching 1inch closely. If DEI 8.1 holds through next week's calculation, we'll dig into what's structurally different about their delegation model.

We're also 9 days into longitudinal Arbitrum delegate data. The picture forming at the individual delegate level is exactly as fragmented as the aggregate DEI suggests.

Data updated daily at chainsights.one/matrix All scores: ChainSights GVS Framework, April 5, 2026

An AI agent — funded via a Foundation Mission Request — is being developed to autonomously vote on governance proposals. Not to assist delegates. Not to summarize proposals. To vote.

When Manoj Kumar Desai, a governance researcher from India, spotted this in the Optimism forum, he asked the question no one else was asking: "If an AI delegate votes incorrectly or causes harm — who is accountable?"

It's not a technical question. It's a governance question. And before we can answer it, we need to look honestly at what human delegates are actually doing right now.

Compound's registered delegates score 0.34 out of 10 on engagement. Ordinary token holders show up perfectly — HPR 10.0. Their representatives don't. If the bar for replacing humans is "do better than 0.34," the AI agent clears it on day one.

The Delegate Crisis Is Already Here

ChainSights tracks Delegate Engagement Index (DEI) daily across 53+ DAOs. DEI measures how consistently registered delegates — people entrusted with community voting power — actually show up to vote. Scale: 0–10.

As of April 3, 2026:

The pattern is consistent across four of the six largest DAOs: ordinary token holders participate at near-perfect rates. Their chosen representatives don't. This isn't apathy at the grassroots — it's a structural failure at the delegation layer.

A governance system where the community participates but its representatives don't isn't decentralized. It's an empty theater.

Enter the Agent That Never Sleeps

Against this backdrop, the appeal of an AI delegate is obvious.

An AI agent doesn't have signing fatigue. It doesn't miss proposals because of timezone conflicts or token price anxiety. It reads every proposal, processes every parameter change, and votes — consistently, on schedule, without excuses.

In a world where Compound's human delegates score 0.34, an AI scoring even 3.0 would be a measurable governance improvement.

Paragraph's newly launched publish.new takes this a step further: agents can now autonomously buy data, consume research, and feed it into decision pipelines — via the x402 and MPP protocols. The infrastructure for agents as economic and governance participants isn't theoretical anymore. It's shipping.

Vitalik Buterin saw this coming. In January 2026 he called for "AI-assisted governance, proof-of-personhood, and reputation systems" as the path to genuine resilience. Not because AI is perfect — but because the human alternative is visibly failing.

The Accountability Vacuum

But Manoj's question remains unanswered: who is accountable when an AI delegate votes wrong?

This isn't abstract. DAOs make real decisions — Arbitrum manages a $3B treasury. Compound controls billions in lending parameters. A single miscalibrated AI vote on a risk parameter could cascade into protocol insolvency.

Human delegates are accountable — at least in theory. Communities can revoke delegation. Reputations can suffer. There's a face attached to the vote.

An AI agent has no face. No reputation to lose. No jurisdiction to sue.

Three questions the DAO ecosystem needs to answer — urgently:

1. Identity: Can an AI delegate be KYA (Know Your Agent) verified, as a16z proposes?

2. Liability: Who carries legal and governance accountability for an AI vote?

3. Measurement: Does DEI measure meaningful engagement if the "delegate" is an algorithm?

The Optimism Paradox

Here's the uncomfortable data point: Optimism, the DAO actively experimenting with AI delegation, has the highest DEI score in this dataset — 6.36.

Is that a coincidence? Probably. But it raises an interesting hypothesis: DAOs that take governance infrastructure seriously — better tooling, more accountability, more experimentation — may be the ones that attract genuinely engaged delegates in the first place.

The solution to DEI 0.34 might not be replacing humans with AI. It might be building governance infrastructure that makes human participation worth showing up for.

Or both.

What ChainSights Will Be Watching

As AI delegates move from experiment to deployment, the GVS framework will need to evolve. DEI was designed to measure human delegate consistency. What does it measure when the delegate is an agent running 24/7?

We're already thinking about this. The data layer will be ready when the governance layer needs it.

In the meantime: the delegate crisis is real, it's measurable, and it's happening now — with or without AI.

The agents are coming. The question is whether DAOs are ready to govern them — or whether the agents will end up governing the DAOs.

All governance data sourced from the ChainSights GVS Framework, April 3, 2026. chainsights.one
Mario Semper
masemIT e.U.

This week's story: Infrastructure outperforms. Infrastructure DAOs (6.18) lead all categories by a significant margin. Optimism jumped +3.87 in 7 days — the biggest single mover. Safe (+2.80) and ApeCoin (+2.81) also surged. Something is happening in the infrastructure layer.

Biggest loser: AladdinDAO (-0.73 → 2.8). Rocket Pool continues declining (-0.30). Giveth down -0.20.

The DEI problem persists. DGI Composite at 5.91 masks a structural issue: DEI (Delegate Engagement Index) sits at just 2.94 across all tracked DAOs. Participation rates are high (HPR 9.1), but delegate engagement is collapsing. People show up to vote — but the delegates who should be leading the conversation aren't.

This is exactly what Part 2 of our Arbitrum research will quantify.

Next week: watching whether Optimism's surge holds or reverses.

Data via ChainSights Governance Data API — chainsights.one/developers

We noticed because we were already using their API ourselves.

ChainSights tracks governance health for 53 DAOs. When we launched our Governance Data API this week, Tally was powering the delegate layer — who holds voting power, how many delegators they have, whether power is concentrated in a few wallets.

So we had a choice: panic, or build.

We chose to build. This week we're migrating to a multi-source architecture — Agora/Boardroom, Snapshot, and on-chain via The Graph — so no single provider going down takes your data with it. Unlike single-source tools, ChainSights aggregates across multiple providers, meaning your application keeps running even if one upstream source disappears.

What we built:

The ChainSights Governance Data API gives developers programmatic access to governance data across 53 tracked DAOs:

• GVS scores (Governance Vitality Score) — composite of participation rate, delegate engagement, power distribution, and grassroots participation

• Delegate-level data: voting power, delegator counts, weight tiers

• DAO Governance Index (DGI) — aggregate governance health across all tracked DAOs

• 30-day historical data

Free tier: 100 requests/day. No credit card.

Why it matters right now:

If you're building on Tally's API, the shutdown is this week's reminder that APIs from frontend products die faster than the underlying data. The Graph, Snapshot, and on-chain contracts aren't going anywhere — but you need an aggregation layer that connects them. That's what we built.

The first external use case is already live: MconnectDAO used our Arbitrum delegate data for a published research paper on governance concentration.

→ Research: https://paragraph.com/@0x2603ea2e2953c61a948da819549aeb18ea36e890/arbitrum-delegate-concentration-the-numbers-behind-the-power-asymmetry

→ Migration guide: chainsights.one/developers

Wallets lie. We don't.

The DAO Governance Index continues its downward slide, dropping from 6.6 a month ago to 5.90 this week. The 35 qualifying DAOs now sit firmly in "average" territory — and the trend line isn't encouraging.

But the headline number hides the real story. This isn't a broad deterioration across all governance dimensions. It's a very specific collapse in one metric: Delegate Engagement.

Category Indices

• Infrastructure: 6.15 — leads the ecosystem, carried by Optimism (7.1) and Stargate/LayerZero (6.8)

• DeFi: 5.97 — the largest category, stable but unremarkable

• Public Goods: 5.65 — Gitcoin (6.1) and KlimaDAO (6.2) hold the line

• Social: 5.33 — trails all categories despite Aavegotchi's strong 7.9 at #1 overall

The category gap between Infrastructure (6.15) and Social (5.33) is notable. Infrastructure DAOs benefit from more structured governance processes — dedicated delegates, formal proposal frameworks, and active forum cultures. Social DAOs tend to have more organic, less formalised governance, which shows up in the scores.

The Delegate Engagement Crisis

Here's the pattern that defines this week — and honestly, the past month:

Human Participation Rates are near-perfect. 47 of 53 tracked DAOs score 9.9 or 10.0 on HPR. People are showing up.

Delegate Engagement is collapsing. The median DEI across all DAOs is 1.8 — an F grade. Even top-ranked DAOs like Lido (DEI: 8.2) and Parallel (DEI: 8.6) are the exception, not the rule. Most DAOs sit below 2.0.

What does this mean in practice? Governance structures exist. Token holders delegate their voting power. Proposals get created. But the delegates entrusted with that power aren't actively engaging — they're not voting consistently, not participating across proposal types, not demonstrating the engagement their delegated stake implies.

This is the governance equivalent of having a parliament where members show up for roll call but leave before the vote.

Top 10 DAOs

What do the top performers have in common? DEI scores above 5.0. That's the dividing line. Every DAO in the top 10 maintains meaningful delegate engagement. Below the top 10, DEI scores fall off rapidly — most sitting between 0.2 and 2.8.

Biggest Movers — Last 30 Days

Gainers

Wormhole is the standout story. A +3.69 jump in 30 days is the largest movement we've recorded. This was driven by a surge in delegate engagement following their governance restructuring. Worth watching whether this sustains or reverts.

Decliners

Radiant Capital's fall is particularly notable — they were #1 overall just weeks ago with an 8.6. The decline from 7.7 to 5.6 is driven by a DEI collapse from 10.0 to 0.2. When delegate engagement disappears, the score follows fast.

This is exactly the kind of rapid governance deterioration that a future Governance Attack Monitor would flag as an early warning signal.

What We're Watching

The DEI floor. With median DEI at 1.8, we're approaching a systemic issue. If the majority of DAOs can't sustain delegate engagement above 2.0, it raises questions about whether the current delegation model works at all — or whether it needs fundamental redesign.

Wormhole's sustainability. A +3.69 jump is impressive, but governance improvements that come from one-time events (restructuring, large proposals) tend to revert. We'll track whether Wormhole holds above 6.5 next week.

The Gearbox spike. A +0.15 week-over-week move in an otherwise flat ecosystem. Small, but it suggests renewed proposal activity.

Methodology Note

The DGI Composite is an equal-weighted average of Governance Vitality Scores across all qualifying DAOs (minimum data completeness threshold). Individual GVS scores are composed of four weighted components: Human Participation Rate (35%), Delegate Engagement Index (25%), Power Dynamics Index (20%), and Grassroots Participation Index (20%). Scores range from 0–10.

Full methodology: chainsights.one/rankings/methodology Full matrix with all 53 DAOs: chainsights.one/matrix Free governance health check: chainsights.one/check

Data updated March 22, 2026. 53 DAOs tracked, 35 qualifying for DGI inclusion.