When I think about governance I do not picture voting dashboards or proposal templates. I think about the people in the Walrus community and how they feel. Who feels like they have a say in what happens and who feels like they are being ignored. Where are the decisions being made that do not really match what is going on in the Walrus community. As the WAL distribution gets wider the Walrus community does not just get people it also gets more complicated. The #Walrus community has a complex social and economic situation. This complexity is a thing but it is not something that we can just ignore. It creates governance challenges, for the Walrus community that're hard to see that are part of the system and that we should think about now.

The Shift From Cohesion to Plurality

When something like WAL is just starting out the people in charge usually agree on things. The people who own WAL tokens have the goals and understand things in a similar way. They also often have experience with technology. But as WAL is used by more people, such as those who store data create applications run the infrastructure and people who just hold onto their tokens the people in charge do not agree as much anymore. WAL starts to be used by a lot of people like storage providers and application developers and this is when the people, in charge start to disagree.

This is not a failure it is a sign of growth.. It changes how we look at the decisions we make. Some proposals that seemed like a good idea at first might actually affect different groups in different ways. For example the people who run the storage systems might think that it is most important to make sure everything runs smoothly while the people who build the applications might care more about being able to predict how much things will cost. When it comes to governance it is not about making sure everyone is on the same page it is more about finding a compromise that works for storage operators and application builders. Governance of storage operators and application builders becomes less about everyone agreeing and more, about storage operators and application builders negotiating with each other.

Participation Inequality, Not Just Token Inequality

I think one problem that will come up is that people will not have the amount of tokens.. That is not the only issue. The bigger problem is that people will not have the ability to take part in things. Making decisions about how thingsre run requires a lot of time and you need to understand what is going on. You also need to be able to keep paying attention over a period of time. As more people get WAL tokens a lot of holders will not be able to. Or they will not want to. Get really involved in the decision making process, about proposals. This is because WAL distribution is getting wider and wider.

This makes things a little unfair. People can make decisions on their own. Really it is a small group of people who are very involved that have a lot of say. The thing is, over time this can lead to the people being in charge the ones who have the most time to participate, not the ones who really care about the network in the long run. Decisions about the network are still being made by people. It is the people who are the most active the ones who have the most bandwidth who are really shaping what happens and that is not always good, for the long-term health of the network.

The Risk of Infrastructure vs. Application Tension

The Walrus sits at a level that affects how things are controlled. This makes control very important. If you change some of the settings like how much you need to stake or the penalty thresholds or the incentives, for storage it can affect everything that uses the Walrus.

WAL is getting used by people who make decisions about how applications work. This means that the people in charge of governance might feel like they have to make things easy for developers now even if it means the whole system is not as strong in the long run.. They might have to do the opposite. It is not easy to balance what the developers want and what is good for the system in the run. This is especially true when the people making decisions want things. WAL has to work for everyone so the people in charge have to make sure they are making decisions, for WAL.

Information Asymmetry and Technical Governance

Another problem with Walrus is that people need to know what is going on. The people in charge of Walrus have to make decisions based on how things work: how fast the network is, if the storage is good and if the cryptography is safe. As more people start using Walrus not everyone will understand the stuff, about Walrus.

This can lead to people making decisions based on what things seem like on the surface than thinking about how the system really works. Even good ideas can get support from people who do not really understand what will happen if we do them because the way things work is very complicated. Governance is driven by surface-level stories, than system-level trade-offs and that is a problem.

This is the part where the way we design governance's more important to me, than the way we actually vote. Governance design is what really matters here not the voting mechanics.

Delegation Without Centralization

When more people get involved it becomes necessary to give some of the work to others. Not every single person can look at every idea that is proposed.. When we give work to others there are some problems that can happen. For example some people may have much influence over the decisions that are made. There can also be groups of people who have power that's not official. The people who are given the work can be in charge, for a long time and they can become like the authorities even if that is not their official job. Delegation can cause these problems, like concentration of influence and delegation can also lead to power structures and the people who are delegated the work can become long-lived delegates, which is a problem because these long-lived delegates can become de facto authorities.

The problem is not about avoiding giving tasks to people it is about making sure that giving tasks to other people stays flexible and easy to understand and can be changed back if needed. If the way WAL is managed starts to be more about people having roles then the idea of giving power to many people becomes more, about following rules rather than actually happening. WAL governance should be flexible so that decentralization is really happening, not something that is supposed to happen.

Governance Fatigue Over Time

One thing that people often forget about is fatigue. When the network gets bigger you have to make a lot decisions. You have to tweak parameters upgrade things and adjust policies all the time. These things can add up. Even people who really care about the network can start to lose interest over time because of fatigue. The network can be affected by fatigue. Fatigue can cause people to disengage from the network.

When people get tired of governing they make decisions slowly. They do not participate very much. This does not make things fail away but it makes the system less responsive over time. Infrastructure protocols like this cannot keep going on like that forever because they need to be able to respond to things that happen. Governance fatigue is a problem, for infrastructure protocols because it can make them less responsive.

A Governance Problem Worth Having

These challenges are not things, to me. I think they are signs that WAL is working the way it should. $WAL is supposed to help more people own a part of a growing ecosystem. That is what it is doing. WAL is spreading ownership across this ecosystem. That is a good thing.

The real problem is when we act like these issues are not real. Things do not usually fall apart, at once. They happen slowly over time. We need to see the problems that come with getting bigger. Then we can make plans that change with the times instead of getting stuck in one way of doing things. The real risk is pretending these challenges do not exist.

When @Walrus 🦭/acc distribution gets bigger the people in charge of Walrus will have to deal with some problems. These problems are things like not everyone participating people wanting different things the technology being really hard to understand and keeping people interested for a long time. These issues are not new. They are really important, for Walrus because of how they work together in the infrastructure protocol. Walrus governance needs to think about how to handle these problems.

For me, the measure of success won’t be whether governance remains simple—it won’t. It will be whether it remains responsive, grounded, and capable of evolving alongside the network it exists to serve.