Topic How a governance token i…e) vs voting rights (control) —– coupled or split? Vote-escro…r time-weighted power (veCRV) —– aligns holders, spawns bribe … (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve)

DAO tokenomics is the design o…oken usually does double duty —– it is both a claim on the org…instrument of control over it —– so its design decides, at onc… lever is the supply schedule —– the total number of tokens an…uously to reward participants —– liquidity providers, stakers,…o holders by shrinking supply —– a crypto analogue of a share …ns: - Airdrops to past users —– the model Uniswap (/wiki/dao… famous with its 400-UNI drop —– reward the people who actuall… to sell. - Treasury reserve —– a large share held by the DAO… - Core contributors and team —– vested allocations that pay t…ng the protocol. - Investors —– early backers who funded deve…iquidity mining / public sale —– tokens distributed for provid… net exposure" to the outcome —– full control, no downside —– which is the mechanical root …their tokens for a fixed term —– up to four years —– to receive voting power (and …V to direct Curve's emissions —– and spawned an open bribe mar…cause much of what it confers —– the right to vote —– has no direct cash flow. Wher…live subject of academic work —– see, e.g., Designing a Token…ply whatever the market holds —– not a figure set by a launch …tion they have actually shown —– so influence accrues to members who have actually voted —– the record is minted 1 per ba…nting it on 11 September 2026 —– and a holder who has never ca…crete rather than speculative —– it is redeemable against a real treasury —– which sidesteps the "governan…1/08/16/voting3.html) (2021) —– borrowed-token "zero net expo…nce/user/curve-tokens/vecrv) —– the canonical vote-escrow / l…/api/token/erc20#ERC20Votes) —– checkpointed governance-token…1109/MC.2020.2996572) (2021).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…lateral in prediction markets.Fees paid in any other token w…e set by a launch spreadsheet.The founder's allocation is no… however the position arrived.Crucially, that same earned we…1109/MC.2020.2996572) (2021).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…on is not a reserved lump but half of a skim on every trade, buy or …h every further tenth of it. Two-thirds of the skim is paid in XRD, on the XRD the trade moves through the curve, after the trade fee; one-third is a slice of the tokens the trade moves, and 1/31 of that token slice is routed to the protocol-wide $CAPER treasury (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/dao-treasury-management) he skim divides three ways: 49.5% to the caper's own treasury in XRD; 50% to the founder, 90% of that in XRD and 10% in the caper's tokens; and 0.5% to the protocol-wide $CAPER treasury (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/dao-treasury-management) in tokens. The XRD part is priced on the XRD the trade moves through the curve, and the token part is a slice of the tokens the trade moves. The rate is bounded and legi…1109/MC.2020.2996572) (2021).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…ve, falls to 1% by the time 10.8% of the supply has sold, and never goes below 0.5%halves again with every further tenth of it. Two-thirds of the skim is pa…1109/MC.2020.2996572) (2021).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…very trade, buy or sell, that falls from its peak on an empty curve as the supply distributes and never reaches zero. Two-thirds of the skim is XRD taken off the trade's gross, alongsidestarts at 100% of a trade on an empty curve, falls to 1% by the time 10% of the supply has sold, and never goes below 0.5%. Two-thirds of the skim is paid in XRD, on the XRD the trade moves through the curve, after the trade fee; one-third is a…1109/MC.2020.2996572) (2021).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…) inherits by construction. A reserve for ecosystem incentives can be tested before launch. A case study by Kim, Laskowski, Zargham and colleagues (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02064) describes how Insolar, an 80-person Swiss blockchain company, worked with researchers from York University and the engineering firm BlockScience to simulate a pool of tokens paid to application developers on an exponentially decaying schedule, running ten simulated years many times over for four starting pool sizes. A larger starting pool left the foundation's treasury worth more at the end, although it then held fewer tokens, while developers' long-run income came out much the same whatever the pool's size. The foundation gained from the gap between fee revenue that grew and subsidy payments that shrank. Separating economic rights fro…move where the leak appears. One token or several Early design advice treated each extra role for a token as a strength. William Mougayar's 2017 business guide (https://medium.com/@wmougayar/tokenomics-a-business-guide-to-token-usage-utility-and-value-b19242053416) scored a token one point for each of 20 roles it could play, from product access and governance to payment, security deposit and profit distribution, on the reasoning that more roles held a business model in place more firmly. Later analysis argued that the roles conflict: holders save a token they expect to appreciate rather than spend it, so the investment role and the payment role undercut each other (see token velocity (/wiki/economics/token-velocity) ). Gnosis (/wiki/daos/networks/gnosisdao) separated the roles from the start. Its January 2017 token model (https://web.archive.org/web/20220214004355/https://blog.gnosis.pm/what-are-gnosis-tokens-the-new-access-based-token-model-e59c5a490af6?gi=5d938e9f4405) had holders lock GNO, the token it sold, to generate a second token, each unit good for $1 of platform fees, with issuance adjusted to keep the supply of these fee credits at 20 times average monthly use. Holding GNO worked like holding a licence, a one-time purchase that paid for access to the platform, while the fee token had no speculative element and could double as stable collateral in prediction markets. Fees paid in any other token were to be auctioned for GNO, with each GNO collected permanently lowering the platform fee. The fee token was announced as WIZ and deployed on Ethereum mainnet as OWL (https://github.com/gnosis/owl-token) . Matt Lockyer (https://hackernoon.com/designing-multi-token-economies-7c7f39916e) proposed a similar split in 2018 for a hypothetical dispute-resolution protocol: an investment token sold to fund the project, a separate token bought to vote on disputes, and the DAI stablecoin for the funds held in escrow, so that the token users spend is kept apart from speculation on the project. Valuing a governance token Wh…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026). - William Mougayar, Tokenomics – A Business Guide to Token Usage, Utility and Value (https://medium.com/@wmougayar/tokenomics-a-business-guide-to-token-usage-utility-and-value-b19242053416) (2017). - Gnosis, What are Gnosis Tokens? – the New Access Based Token Model (https://web.archive.org/web/20220214004355/https://blog.gnosis.pm/what-are-gnosis-tokens-the-new-access-based-token-model-e59c5a490af6?gi=5d938e9f4405) (2017), archived copy; owl-token (https://github.com/gnosis/owl-token) contracts. - Matt Lockyer, Designing Multi-Token Economies (https://hackernoon.com/designing-multi-token-economies-7c7f39916e) (2018), Hacker Noon. - Henry M. Kim, Marek Laskowski, Michael Zargham, Hjalmar Turesson, Matt Barlin and Danil Kabanov, Token Economics in Real-Life: Cryptocurrency and Incentives Design for Insolar Blockchain Network (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02064) (preprint), published in Computer 54(1): 70–80 (https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2020.2996572) (2021).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…very trade, buy or sell, that taperfalls from its peak on an empty curve to nothing once 30% of the supply circulatesas the supply distributes and never reaches zero. Two-thirds of the skim is XR…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…wiki/markets/bonding-curve) , minted on demand when someone buyssold out of a fixed supply of 100 billion that is minted once, when the caper is created, into the caper's own inventory vault with no role able to mint more or burn any, and breturned to that vault when someone sells, s. So "supply in circulation" is simply whatever the market has boughtolds — not a figure set by a launc…founder's allocation is not a pre-minserved lump but accrues a small slice skim ofn every buy, tapering toward zero as the caper fills up, and a fixed fractiontrade, buy or sell, that tapers from its peak on an empty curve to nothing once 30% of the supply circulates. Two-thirds of the skim is XRD taken off the trade's gross, alongside the trade fee; one-third is a slice of the tokens the trade moves, and 1/31 of that sametoken slice is routed to the protoc…sury/dao-treasury-management) — so early-buyer dilution. The rate is bounded and legible rather…n hidden in a vesting schedule, but because sales pay it too, the total a founder collects has no fixed cap as a share of supply. On the value-versus-control…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

DAO tokenomics is the design o… to members who have actually transacted with the capervoted — the record is minted 1 per ballot cast and 0.01 per XRD of gross trade value — and a holder whose position was simply transferred in earns no say at allon nothing else, since trades stopped minting it on 11 September 2026 — and a holder who has never cast a ballot earns no say at all, however the position arrived. Crucially, that same earned …bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…ed by Curve's veCRV (https://docs.curve.readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.htmlfinance/user/curve-tokens/vecrv) , they require holders to lo…oting Escrow (veCRV) (https://docs.curve.readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.htmlfinance/user/curve-tokens/vecrv) — the canonical vote-escrow…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…luence accrues to members who show up, and a holder who merely passes tokens through earns little sayhave actually transacted with the caper — the record is minted 1 per ballot cast and 0.01 per XRD of gross trade value — and a holder whose position was simply transferred in earns no say at all. Crucially, that same earned …bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…AOs taper emissions over time. Where that taper lives decides whether it is governable at all: read at contract source, Curve's is a schedule no address can amend, Uniswap's is a capped permission its DAO has never used, and Compound's ended by running out ( emissions without a vote (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/emissions-without-a-vote) ). - Vesting. Tokens granted to…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

Topic How a governance token i…ed cap · emissions/inflation · vesting (/wiki/economics/token-unlocks-and-vesting) · buyback & burn (/wiki/econo… (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve)

DAO tokenomics is the design o…ock the market watches closely – and, because vesting locks transfers but usually not votes, a governance event as well. See token unlocks and vesting schedules (/wiki/economics/token-unlocks-and-vesting) . - Buyback & burn. Some DAOs…ed weight sets each member's pro-rata claim on the treasury at exit …ip/rage-quit-and-exit-rights) – and that claim is the weight itself, tokens held combined with votes cast, not a pro-rata slice of tokens alone: voice and exit are the same …bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

Topic How a governance token i…missions/inflation · vesting · buyback & burn (/wiki/economics/fee-switches-and-value-accrual) Distribution Airdrop · treas…ken-weighted voting (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/voting/token-weighte…Treasury management (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/treasury/dao-treasur…Voting & delegation (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/voting/voting-and-de… (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve)

DAO tokenomics is the design o…he model Uniswap (/wiki/daos/organizations/dexs/uniswap-dao) made famous…is is the treasury (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/treasury/dao-treasur… governance attacks (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-securit…ken-weighted voting (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/voting/token-weighte… the bribe markets (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-securit…he "Curve Wars," (/wiki/daos/organizations/dexs/curve-dao) in which prot…de $CAPER treasury (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/treasury/dao-treasur…he treasury at exit (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/membership/rage-quit…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

Topic How a governance token i…ken-weighted voting (/wiki/daos/concepts/voting/token-weighted-voting) , Treasury management (/wiki/daos/concepts/treasury/dao-treasury-management) , Voting & delegation (/wiki/daos/concepts/voting/voting-and-delegation) , Bonding cu… (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve)

DAO tokenomics is the design o… the model Uniswap (/wiki/dao/ecosystems/organizations/dexs/uniswap-dao) made famous wit…is is the treasury (/wiki/daos/concepts/treasury/dao-treasury-management) the … governance attacks (/wiki/daos/concepts/analysis/dao-security-and-governance-at…ken-weighted voting (/wiki/daos/concepts/voting/token-weighted-voting) inheri… the bribe markets (/wiki/daos/concepts/analysis/dao-security-and-governance-at… the "Curve Wars," (/wiki/dao/ecosystems/organizations/dexs/curve-dao) in which protocol…de $CAPER treasury (/wiki/daos/concepts/treasury/dao-treasury-management) — so…he treasury at exit (/wiki/daos/concepts/membership/rage-quit-and-exit-rights) : v…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

DAO tokenomics is the design o…eded so well it triggered the "Curve Wars," (/wiki/dao/ecosystem/curve-dao) in which protocols competed t…bs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).

Topic How a governance token is designed, distributed, and valued Supply levers Fixed cap · emissions/inflation · vesting · buyback & burn Distribution Airdrop · treasury reserve · contributors · investors · liquidity mining Core tension Economic rights (value) vs voting rights (control) — coupled or split? Vote-escrow Lock tokens for time-weighted power (veCRV) — aligns holders, spawns bribe markets On Caper Bonding-curve issuance, no emissions schedule; weight = stake × participation Related Token-weighted voting (/wiki/dao/concepts/token-weighted-voting) , Treasury management (/wiki/dao/concepts/dao-treasury-management) , Voting & delegation (/wiki/dao/concepts/voting-and-delegation) , Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve)

DAO tokenomics is the design of a decentralized organization's native token: how many exist, how they enter circulation, who receives them, and what holding one entitles you to. In a DAO the token usually does double duty — it is both a claim on the organization's economic upside and the instrument of control over it — so its design decides, at once, who profits and who governs. Get it wrong and the two goals collide: a token distributed to maximise a launch valuation can hand control to short-term speculators, while one distributed to align long-term stewards can starve the treasury of the capital it needs. a16z's DAO canon (https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/dao-canon/) treats token design as the foundational choice every other governance decision inherits. Supply: how many tokens, and how they enter The first lever is the supply schedule — the total number of tokens and the rate at which they reach circulation. - Fixed cap. A hard maximum minted at genesis (Uniswap's 1B UNI). Predictable and scarce, but with nothing left to issue, later contributor rewards must come out of the treasury or from tokens already reserved. - Emissions / inflation. New tokens minted continuously to reward participants — liquidity providers, stakers, contributors. Emissions bootstrap activity but dilute existing holders, and "mercenary" capital often farms the rewards and leaves, so many DAOs taper emissions over time. - Vesting. Tokens granted to founders, early contributors, and investors are typically locked and released on a schedule (often a one-year cliff then multi-year linear vesting) so insiders cannot dump at launch and their incentives stay tied to the long term. A large vesting unlock is a scheduled supply shock the market watches closely. - Buyback & burn. Some DAOs use protocol revenue to buy tokens on the open market and burn them, returning value to holders by shrinking supply — a crypto analogue of a share buyback, and a way to route fees to holders without a taxable dividend. Distribution: who gets the tokens Where the supply goes at launch shapes governance more than any later vote. Common allocations: - Airdrops to past users — the model Uniswap (/wiki/dao/ecosystem/uniswap-dao) made famous with its 400-UNI drop — reward the people who actually used the protocol and decentralize ownership quickly, but airdropped tokens are also the easiest to sell. - Treasury reserve — a large share held by the DAO itself, to be deployed by future governance for grants, incentives, and operations. This is the treasury (/wiki/dao/concepts/dao-treasury-management) the organization later governs. - Core contributors and team — vested allocations that pay the people building the protocol. - Investors — early backers who funded development, usually on the longest vesting schedules and the sharpest source of "VC capture" criticism. - Liquidity mining / public sale — tokens distributed for providing liquidity or bought directly, seeding a market price and a tradable float. The recurring failure is concentration. However carefully a token is distributed, holdings tend to pool: studies of large DAOs repeatedly find voting power concentrated in well under 1% of addresses, so a token that is nominally "one token, one vote" is in practice governed by a handful of whales and delegates. Concentration is the root cause of most of the governance attacks (/wiki/dao/concepts/dao-security-and-governance-attacks) catalogued elsewhere in this wiki, and the problem token-weighted voting (/wiki/dao/concepts/token-weighted-voting) inherits by construction. Separating economic rights from voting rights Because a governance token bundles value and control, its holders can face a conflict: the profit-maximising choice and the protocol-maximising choice are not always the same, and a holder with no lasting stake can vote for the former. Vitalik Buterin's Moving beyond coin voting governance (https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html) sharpens the point: a voter who borrows tokens to vote has "zero net exposure" to the outcome — full control, no downside — which is the mechanical root of vote-buying and the bribe markets (/wiki/dao/concepts/dao-security-and-governance-attacks) that grew up around governance. Much of modern tokenomics is an attempt to re-couple the two, so that whoever holds the votes also holds the risk. Vote-escrow (ve) models are the best-known answer. Pioneered by Curve's veCRV (https://curve.readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.html) , they require holders to lock their tokens for a fixed term — up to four years — to receive voting power (and a boosted share of rewards), with power scaling by lock length and decaying as the lock runs down. Locking forcibly ties control to a multi-year commitment: you cannot vote and immediately sell. The design succeeded so well it triggered the "Curve Wars," in which protocols competed to accumulate veCRV to direct Curve's emissions — and spawned an open bribe market where locked voters are paid for their votes, re-introducing the very vote-buying it aimed to suppress. The lesson generalizes: no purely token-based scheme fully escapes the value-versus-control tension; it can only move where the leak appears. Valuing a governance token What a governance token is worth is genuinely contested, because much of what it confers — the right to vote — has no direct cash flow. Where a token also carries economic rights (a claim on fees, a buyback, or a treasury share), analysts value it on those flows; where it is "governance-only," its price rests on the expected future value of control, which is far harder to pin down and a live subject of academic work — see, e.g., Designing a Token Economy: Incentives, Governance, and Tokenomics (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09608) (2026). This is the token-valuation (/wiki/economics/token-valuation) problem in the economics section, and it is why the sharpest tokenomics designs try to give the token a concrete economic claim rather than leaving it a pure governance right. How Caper approaches this A caper (/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) takes a deliberately different route to nearly every choice above. There is no emissions schedule, no vesting cliffs, and no allocation table to negotiate: a caper's tokens are issued by a bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) , minted on demand when someone buys and burned when someone sells, so "supply in circulation" is simply whatever the market has bought — not a figure set by a launch spreadsheet. The founder's allocation is not a pre-mined lump but accrues a small slice of every buy, tapering toward zero as the caper fills up, and a fixed fraction of that same slice is routed to the protocol-wide $CAPER treasury (/wiki/dao/concepts/dao-treasury-management) — so early-buyer dilution is bounded and legible rather than hidden in a vesting schedule. On the value-versus-control tension, a caper does not lean on locking. Instead of ve-style time-locks, voting weight (/wiki/governance/voting) combines the stake a member holds with the participation they have actually shown — so influence accrues to members who show up, and a holder who merely passes tokens through earns little say. Crucially, that same earned weight sets each member's pro-rata claim on the treasury at exit (/wiki/dao/concepts/rage-quit-and-exit-rights) : voice and exit are the same number, which re-couples control to genuine economic exposure without a bribe-prone lock market. The token's economic backing is concrete rather than speculative — it is redeemable against a real treasury — which sidesteps the "governance-only, hard-to-value" problem at its root. The exact mechanics live on the linked markets (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) and governance (/wiki/governance/voting) pages; this article is the map of the wider landscape they sit in. References - a16z crypto, The DAO canon (https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/dao-canon/) and Governance FAQ (https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/governance-faq/) . - Vitalik Buterin, Moving beyond coin voting governance (https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html) (2021) — borrowed-token "zero net exposure" and the value/control split. - Curve, Voting Escrow (veCRV) (https://curve.readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.html) — the canonical vote-escrow / lockup model. - OpenZeppelin, ERC20Votes (https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/5.x/api/token/erc20#ERC20Votes) — checkpointed governance-token balances underpinning on-chain voting. - Chainlink, DAO governance and governance tokens (https://blog.chain.link/dao-governance/) . - Designing a Token Economy: Incentives, Governance, and Tokenomics (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09608) (arXiv, 2026).