Reflexer issues RAI, a decentralized stable asset that is deliberately not pegged to the dollar. Users lock ETH as the sole collateral and mint RAI against it; instead of chasing a fixed $1 target, RAI runs a managed float around a moving redemption price that started near $3.14 at launch. The system's job is not to hold a peg but to dampen volatility: an on-chain controller continuously nudges RAI's market price toward its redemption price without any human deciding the target. It is one of the most-cited experiments in autonomous, minimally-governed money — a foil to both custodial pegs and heavily-governed CDP stablecoins like Aave's GHO.

Autonomous monetary policy: the PID controller

Where MakerDAO sets its stability fee by governance vote, RAI hands that lever to an on-chain PI (proportional–integral) controller. The controller reads the gap between RAI's market price and its redemption price and outputs a redemption rate — a per-second re- or de-valuation of the redemption price itself. When RAI trades above target, the rate makes holding RAI less attractive and minting it more so, pushing the market back down; when it trades below, the reverse. The integral term means the controller also weighs how long and how far the price has drifted, so the response is smoother than a naive one-shot correction. No governance vote sets the rate — the controller runs autonomously, which is precisely the point: monetary policy without a monetary-policy committee.

"Ungovernance": removing the governance itself

RAI's governance token is named the Reflexer Ungovernance Token (FLX), and the name is the thesis. Rather than accumulate governance power, FLX holders were meant to spend it down — steering a staged process that removes governance capabilities on a published schedule until little discretionary control remains. FLX's residual job is that of a lender of last resort: if the system goes underwater, FLX is autonomously minted and auctioned in debt auctions to recapitalize it, mirroring MKR's backstop role in Maker.

The published governance-minimization guide lays out concrete stages. An early level stripped governance control over core mechanisms — liquidation, auctions, and the oracle relayer. A later level removed governance from the SAFE Engine, the Accounting Engine, and the protocol-token authorities, which permanently blocks governance from adding new collateral types (a large share of Maker's real-world governance surface). What is deliberately kept under community control is the hard-to-automate perimeter: oracles and medianizers, PID-controller tuning, the stability-fee treasury, and saviour contracts. The goal is not zero governance but the smallest governance surface a working stablecoin can run on.

Status, legacy, and the HAI fork

Reflexer Labs has wound down active development, but the design is built to survive exactly that: RAI's contracts are immutable and continue operating on Ethereum without the team. The immutability-as-endgame idea reappears in Liquity, whose V1 is similarly frozen and ungoverned — RAI and Liquity are the two canonical "governance can't touch the core" case studies in DeFi.

RAI's codebase also lives on through forks. The most prominent is HAI, a multi-collateral RAI fork on Optimism that reuses the same PI-controller machinery but anchors near $1 and accepts several collateral types (ETH, wstETH, and later OP) rather than ETH alone. RAI thus sits at one end of the DAO-industry's governance spectrum: a stablecoin whose founders' explicit aim was to make themselves, and eventually all governors, unnecessary.

How Caper approaches this

RAI answers governance risk by subtracting governance — automate monetary policy, then delete the levers so no one (not even a captured vote) can pull them. That is the right move for a single-purpose money machine. Most DAOs, though, exist precisely to keep deciding things — funding, hires, direction — so they can't ungovern their way out of capture. Caper takes the other route: keep governance, but change what a vote is made of so control is harder to simply buy.

In the Caper contract, a member's weight is w = (t · v) / (V · T) — held tokens t multiplied by an earned vote factor v, over total vote supply V and circulating tokens T (compute_vote_weight, verified in contracts/src/caper_dao.rs). The vote factor comes from a soulbound, non-transferable vote token (minted at DIVISIBILITY_NONE), and the same weight formula sets a member's treasury share on exit(). Capital still counts — a bigger bag is a larger multiplier — but the earned, un-purchasable record is a factor a whale can't acquire on a market. Where RAI removes the attack surface, Caper keeps the surface and makes a decisive slice of it unbuyable. See the wider governance-models map for where each design sits.