I’ll offer a framing point from some ethnographic work I’ve done on validator governance — mostly in Cosmos, where on-chain validator voting already exists (see published paper with Jason Potts and Josh Tan, ‘The Natural State of Blockchains: An ethnography of validator governance’ in ICS).
The thread has rightly converged on cartelisation. My concern is that the proposal is a category shift for Ethereum.
Today validator rewards and penalties are defined impersonally by the protocol. A 51%/66% attack lets you censor or destroy, but — as the exchange above concedes — not redirect a standing pool of capital toward yourself. VRR creates that pool and makes its allocation a discretionary, political decision. In institutional economics terms (see North, Wallis & Weingast (NWW)), that’s the manufacture of a rent plus a locus of discretionary power over it: the defining feature of a limited-access order, where a coalition of elites decides who is admitted to the flow of funds. The 10% cap bounds the size of the prize but it doesn’t change its nature.
The deeper issue is that the proposal’s safety case rests entirely on elite restraint whereby cartels can tank the price, the social layer can fork them out, the majority is honest, operator competition disciplines bad allocation etc. Each of these is a limited-access-order argument: order held together by interlocking elite self-interest and the threat of mutual destruction, rather than by impersonal rules that make capture impossible. It’s the ‘natural state’ in the NWW social order framework, not an escape from it. We should be looking for designs that constrain elite power structurally instead of trusting elites to constrain themselves.
On the operator-competition defence specifically (@clesaege’s rejoinder, and the “users migrate to operators whose values they like” mechanism): my fieldwork showed some flaws in this. The consistent finding across validators on DPoS chains was that delegators stake and forget. Validators who built newsletters, dashboards, and voting-intention disclosures to compete on governance reported almost no engagement and no measurable delegation gains — delegation tracked yield and brand, not governance behaviour. Staking share is definitely sticky. If delegators won’t switch operators over how their validator votes on protocol governance, there’s little reason to expect them to switch over where their validator redirects their rewards. The principal-agent problem isn’t softened by a values market.
And while decoupling impersonal rate-setting from discretionary allocation may separate out the political part, it relocates the limited-access boundary to whoever accredits the institutions, which is the same problem.
I also think the issue may be mis-specified in the VRR proposal. The framing here is “public goods / free-rider,” whereas what’s actually being funded is better understood as dependencies: which software, research and infrastructure other things rely on. That distinction matters, because if recipients are identified by tracing dependencies, “which addresses get funded” stops being a vote validators take and becomes something a contribution system computes. Protocol Guild already is a contribution system. Validators might be well-placed to signal the redirect rate (a collective macro question); they are the wrong body to choose recipients.
One caveat from having watched contribution systems up close is that contribution systems don’t abolish the limited-access boundary; they relocate it to whoever governs the metric and the membership. So the real design question, for any version of this — VRR, accredited institutions, a Protocol-Guild route — is where subjective judgement enters and how legible and contestable the reward function is to the people it’s imposed on (I have written about this elsewhere, including ‘Value through Contribution Systems’ which discusses validators specifically). Validator-selected recipient addresses puts that judgement at the most concentrated, least contestable point in the stack. A dependency-tracing system with broad, commons-style governance over its weights puts it somewhere more defensible, but it’s only as good as the contestability of those weights, which is where the design effort should go.
I am all for funding development. But minting a discretionary rent and handing allocation to the most concentrated layer of the stack builds limited-access institutions (aka feudal Italy), when the tools to compute allocation from contribution already exist and point the other way.
| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Futarchy is insecure without a trusted gatekeeper | 0 | 0 | 21-06-2026 |
| 2 | Scaling in Hegota: using the ETH transfer to anchor execution and bandwidth | 0 | 0 | 19-06-2026 |
| 3 | A native zkEVM scales bandwidth, not just execution | 0 | 0 | 22-06-2026 |
| 4 | Exploring ownership fragmentation as a privacy primitive for the post-Pectra EVM | 0 | 0 | 23-06-2026 |
| 5 | Relationship-Anchored Money: Separating Symbolization from Securitization | 0 | 0 | 22-06-2026 |
| 6 | Repurposing FOCIL as an L2 forced transaction mechanism | 0 | 0 | 19-06-2026 |
| 7 | Cooperative Capitalism Is the Last Coherent Economic Path Crypto Has Left | 0 | 0 | 23-06-2026 |
| 8 | Building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt | 0 | 0 | 19-06-2026 |
| 9 | ETH needs a supply cap at 128 million | 0 | 0 | 21-06-2026 |
| 10 | A Criticism of LUCID and Encryption-Scheme-Agnostic Encrypted Mempool Designs | 0 | 0 | 22-06-2026 |
