I first noticed the pattern during a governance call for a prominent DeFi protocol last March. We were twenty minutes deep into a proposal discussion about adjusting a collateral factor by 0.5%, and the forum post that sparked it was a 2,000-word essay filled with polite greetings, historical context, and three redundant conclusions. As the debate meandered, I saw the familiar glazed eyes of fellow delegates—smart, committed people overwhelmed by information debt. That moment crystallized a question I had been circling for months: Is our governance infrastructure optimized for deliberation, or for actually getting things done?
The answer, I suspected, was neither. And the solution arrived not from a Layer-2 scaling breakthrough or a novel consensus mechanism, but from a simple, almost embarrassingly obvious set of rules: a DAO skill called “Proposal-ADHD” —a community-made template that forces any on-chain or off-chain proposal to adhere to a strict brevity and action-oriented format.
At first glance, this is just prompt engineering for blockchain governance. A collection of ten rules, contributed anonymously on GitHub in late February, quickly amassed over 1,100 stars within three weeks. The rules are brutally direct: “First line must state the exact on-chain action required.” “No salutations or closing niceties longer than five words.” “List maximum five supporting data points, one per line.” “Eliminate all repetition—if a point is made, do not restate it in the conclusion.” The template is designed as a “skill”—a plug-in wrapper for popular governance tools like Tally, Snapshot, and Agora, applied automatically when a user creates a new proposal.
The community reception was immediate and fierce. Proposals using the template saw voting participation increase by an average of 18% in the first two weeks, as measured by a small independent dashboard set up by a developer from the Uniswap delegation. The reason is intuitive: when proposals are shorter, more delegates actually read them. The cognitive load of parsing a 3,000-word RFC is replaced by a crisp, executable list. It’s the governance equivalent of moving from a dense academic paper to a well-designed pull request.
But this isn’t just a UX improvement. It’s a signal—a technical critique of the default behavior of our most sacred governance processes. The popularity of the “Proposal-ADHD” template reveals a systemic pain point: that most DAO proposals are written not for efficiency, but for ritualistic completeness. We include context to appear thorough, we pad with historical references to show domain expertise, and we soften language to avoid conflict. But in doing so, we obscure the very action we need from the community: a yes-or-no vote on a specific change.
The core insight here is that the bottleneck in decentralized governance has shifted from technical security to attention allocation. We’ve solved multisig theft, we’ve built timelocks, we’ve stress-tested quorum thresholds. What we haven’t solved is the human cost of information overload. The average active delegate in a major DAO now receives over 30 proposals per week across multiple chains and forums. Reading and understanding each one fully is impossible. The result is either delegate apathy (low participation) or decisions based on the loudest voices. A brief-only protocol flips this dynamic: it forces the proposer to prioritize, and it gives the voter a clear entry point.
But applying the template across all proposal types would be a mistake—and this is where the contrarian angle emerges. The template’s strength is also its weakness. For complex, high-impact proposals—a tokenomics redesign, a migration to a new chain, a partnership with legal implications—brevity can sacrifice nuance. A five-point list cannot capture the systemic risks of a cross-chain bridge upgrade. The template’s authors implicitly acknowledge this by adding a rule: “If the proposal requires more than five data points, it should be broken into multiple sub-proposals.” Yet this assumes modularity, which is not always possible. Some decisions are inherently holistic.
Furthermore, there is a subtle danger of performative efficiency. A short proposal that says “Increase yield on pool X to 20%” might get quick approval, but without the context of why that pool needs incentivization or how it affects the overall risk profile, we risk cargo-cult governance. The template can inadvertently favor proposals that are simple to explain over those that are correct but complex. This is the classic tension between speed and depth. We must be careful not to optimize for participation at the expense of informed reasoning.
Another blind spot relates to legal and compliance exposure. Most DAOs today have the legal status of “no legal status”—members face unlimited personal liability when governance fails. A concise, action-only proposal that does not include risk disclosures or jurisdictional caveats could be interpreted as negligence by a court. The template, as currently designed, removes all legal boilerplate. While that saves time, it also removes a protective layer. One project I’ve worked with, a regulated stablecoin DAO, specifically forbids the use of this template because their legal counsel requires certain disclaimers in every vote. The tension between efficiency and legal safety is real.
Let me ground this in a real example. Two weeks ago, a small DAO called “ReFi Collective” used the template to propose reducing their carbon offset reward rate. The proposal was three lines: “1. Decrease offset reward rate from 0.5 to 0.3. 2. Effective immediately. 3. Rationale: budget rebalancing.” It passed with 92% approval. But three days later, a delegate discovered that the budget rebalancing was due to a larger capital requirement for a separate initiative that had not been discussed. The quick vote had bypassed the deliberation needed to surface that dependency. The DAO had to initiate a follow-up proposal to revert, wasting two weeks and gas fees.
This is not to dismiss the template—far from it. The core idea is brilliant and necessary. It’s a trustless efficiency gain: it doesn’t require a change to the underlying protocol; it merely changes the social layer. The template is a testament to the power of open-source governance primitives. But like any primitive, it must be used with awareness of its limits.
What does this tell us about the future of DAOs? First, that attention is the scarcest resource in decentralized decision-making. Any tool that helps delegates focus reduces the risk of governance attack by exhaustion. Second, that the industry is ripe for a “governance middleware” market—tools between the base layer and the user interface that optimize for human cognition. I expect to see more such templates emerge, each tailored for different proposal types: security audits, treasury management, social contracts. Third, that the platform providers (Tally, Snapshot, Agora, etc.) will likely absorb these best practices into their default UI, just as Anthropic might incorporate brevity rules into Claude’s system prompt. The third-party template creators must differentiate or risk being commoditized.
Looking ahead, I believe we are entering a phase where governance user experience will become a competitive differentiator for Layer-1 and Layer-2 ecosystems. The chain that can attract and retain active, informed delegates will survive the bear market. The chain that buries users in white papers and forum walls will bleed talent to simpler alternatives. The “Proposal-ADHD” template is a early signal of this shift.
But I remain wary of the ethical corner: if we optimize solely for brevity and participation, do we risk sacrificing the very deliberation that makes decentralized governance unique? The answer lies not in the tool, but in the culture that adopts it. Conscience over consensus. We must remember that a DAO is not a machine—it is a collection of humans trying to coordinate. Efficiency should serve understanding, not replace it.
Takeaway: The next time you write a governance proposal, ask yourself: “Does this respect the reader’s attention as much as it makes my point?” If not, refactor. Trust is earned, not mined. And in a world of infinite information, brevity is the highest form of respect for other delegates’ time. The most decentralized future is one where every vote is as clear as a single line of code.
