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 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 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 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 catalogued elsewhere in this wiki, and the problem 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 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 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, 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 (2026). This is the 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 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, 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 — 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 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: 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 and governance pages; this article is the map of the wider landscape they sit in.

References

• a16z crypto, The DAO canon and Governance FAQ.
• Vitalik Buterin, Moving beyond coin voting governance (2021) — borrowed-token "zero net exposure" and the value/control split.
• Curve, Voting Escrow (veCRV) — the canonical vote-escrow / lockup model.
• OpenZeppelin, ERC20Votes — checkpointed governance-token balances underpinning on-chain voting.
• Chainlink, DAO governance and governance tokens.
• Designing a Token Economy: Incentives, Governance, and Tokenomics (arXiv, 2026).