6 decentralized governance trends for 2025
As the online world becomes more and more important, we’ll need to make more and more high-stakes, collective decisions together online. For this reason, 2025 promises to be an exciting year for decentralized governance. DAOs are continuing to push the envelope in developing new ways for anonymous token-holders to govern together. At the same time, organizations like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard are trying to persuade their customers to participate more often in online shareholder voting. And AI companies including Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI are using citizens’ assemblies to help set guardrails for LLMs.
With all this momentum, here are some of the themes I’ll be watching for and working on in the new year.
Websites to help voters delegate. Delegation is essential for online governance, but it remains challenging for voters to wisely choose delegates. While our research shows that user-friendly delegation websites can increase participation by over 20%, fundamental questions remain about how to present delegate choices to users without further centralizing power. The problem is that with many choices of people to delegate to (a good problem to have), the way the information is sorted and presented becomes critical. We don’t yet know how best to present this information, or even who should be in charge of deciding it. 2025 will be the year to carefully design how to present delegate information and to track the effects.
AI delegation. Can we use AI agents to help users to find delegates who fit their views? Perhaps users could converse with the agent and answer questions about their values and goals. Agents could then review delegates’ votes and platforms, the content of proposals, and forum discussions to assess which delegates seem like the best options for users. As generative AI races forward, 2025 promises to be a year of fascinating experimentation where AI and governance intersect.
AI delegates. Or even more radically, could we develop AI agents who understand their principal’s preferences and vote on their behalf? Could they engage in forum discussions with other AI agents? Develop proposals? While true AI delegates may be farther off, the coming year will be a great time to explore how this will work.
Smarter incentives for participation. Experience and research have shown that one-off, airdropped rewards often aren’t enough to induce people to meaningfully participate in decentralized projects. In 2025 we’ll see a number of exciting experiments on how to go beyond airdrops. Where projects simply need to incentivize an inherently economically valuable activity (e.g., transactions), they can use direct subsidies. Where projects want to incentivize something harder to measure, they can try longer-term incentives including repeated sequences of rewards in combination with time locks.
Better funding programs for public goods. Projects depend on members of the community to help build an ecosystem around their protocols. But current approaches to awarding grants and retroactive rewards often fail to encourage high-risk, high-reward ideas: Members are incentivized to pursue projects they believe have a high chance of receiving funding, not necessarily those that they believe in the strongest. A logical next step is to explore venture-like models for public goods, in which projects are given capital upfront with the chance for big payoffs later on if the community deems the outcome a success. 2025 is primed to be the year when new funding programs take flight.
More experiments in sortition. AI companies including Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI have all explored using sortition to help set guardrails around AI. Sortition is the random selection of users to participate in structured discussions that lead to collective policy recommendations. Similar experiments are going on now in web3. To really test sortition, though, we’ll need to find opportunities to give these assemblies binding powers, not just the ability to make recommendations, and we’ll need to see whether their decisions bear out. For many of the most important problems, we need delegates and token-holders to study the issue, develop expertise, and iterate over a long period of time, which sortition is not well suited for (since each assembly evaporates after its deliberation is complete). But we’ll see how far sortition might take us in the coming year.
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Andrew Hall is a Professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a Professor of Political Science. He works with the a16z research lab and is an advisor to tech companies, startups, and blockchain protocols on issues at the intersection of technology, governance, and society.
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