NODE/03 · Term

Governance

Decision-making mechanism in a decentralised protocol: governance-token holders vote on parameter changes, upgrades, and treasury spending. On TON, governance is still mostly off-chain Snapshot-style.

Aliases: governance, onchain governance, dao voting

Governance is the process of making collective decisions about a protocol: upgrades, parameter changes, treasury spending. It is implemented through votes by governance-token holders or community members.

Models

Token-weighted voting — 1 token = 1 vote. Simple, but biased toward whales.
Quadratic voting — the cost of additional votes grows quadratically. Reduces whale dominance.
SBT-gated — only holders of a non-transferable badge can vote.
Off-chain (Snapshot) — voting happens off-chain (by signature); execution is multisig.

Governance on TON as of 2026

TON Foundation itself is not a decentralised DAO — it’s a legal entity.
Major protocols (STON.fi) launched governance tokens and run off-chain votes.
No mature on-chain DAO framework comparable to Aragon exists on TON yet.

Concrete governance cases on TON

STON.fi — launched the STON governance token, runs off-chain Snapshot votes, multisig executor for execution. Votes: emission rate, jetton listings, fees.
DAOlama — staking protocol with its own governance: DAO-token holders vote on pool parameters.
Tonkeeper community — not a protocol-DAO but community-signal: polls in the Telegram chat via bot-polls for feature prioritisation. No on-chain execution, but it shapes the roadmap.
TON Strategy / TON Society — grants and treasury distribution — formally via a committee, not open voting (a legal-corporate overlay, not a DAO).

Treasury and delegated voting

In mature DeFi protocols a share of emission goes to a treasury managed by governance. Spending decisions (grants, marketing, security audits) come from proposals and votes. Delegated voting lets you assign your vote to a trusted expert without giving up token ownership (DAO trick: delegation ≠ transfer).

Governance-attack risks

Vote-buying — an attacker buys tokens just before a vote, votes for a profitable outcome (e.g. drain the treasury), sells them back. Defence: vote vesting (veToken model).
Flash-loan governance — borrow tokens in a flash loan, vote, return. Defence: snapshot voting power before the vote starts (like Snapshot.org).
Low quorum — a small attacker group pushes through harmful proposals. Defence: minimum-quorum threshold (e.g. 4% of supply).
Executor worker-attacks — multisig signers can sabotage. Defence: timelock between approve and execute (24-72 hours).

Known frameworks

Snapshot.org — off-chain voting by signature, not TON-specific, works with any EVM/non-EVM chain. On TON, used via TON Connect login.
DAOlama framework — a TON-native SDK for on-chain voting; lacks Aragon-style UI, but provides primitives.
Custom multisig — most TON projects roll their own governance to match the specific protocol’s needs.