Governance delegate

A governance delegate never takes possession of the tokens. The holder keeps ownership in their wallet and only assigns the associated voting right. In ERC20Votes or COMP-style tokens, voting power is not even active until someone calls delegate(address), pointing either to a third party or to their own address (self-delegation). Vote weight is frozen by block snapshot when a proposal becomes active, which blocks double voting and last-minute token buying ahead of a vote. The pattern began with Compound's COMP token in June 2020 and spread through OpenZeppelin ERC20Votes and the EIP-5805 standard, which formalizes delegation with checkpoints and relies on the EIP-6372 clock.

It tackles voter apathy and quorum problems. Concentrating votes in active delegates lets a DAO keep operating when most holders sit out. This gives rise to the professional delegate: research firms, universities or funds that read and reason through each proposal and publish a delegate statement setting out their criteria. The trade-off, noted in recent research, is that delegation tends to concentrate power in a few addresses, so any design has to watch for that concentration.

Uniswap requires native delegation to activate voting and rewards its most active delegates with UNI through its Delegate Reward Initiative. Optimism's Token House gathers OP holders and their delegates, who vote on Mission Requests and protocol upgrades. Tally is the dominant interface for proposals and delegate dashboards, while Snapshot handles gasless off-chain voting. Arbitrum and ENS follow the same pattern.