Quorum

The vote closed at 02:00 UTC, which was 04:00 for Lena, which was the sort of time she'd promised herself she'd stopped being awake for. She was awake. The laptop was on the kitchen counter and the flat was dark except for it, and on the screen the numbers were still moving, slowly, the way they did in the last hour when the whales woke up in whatever timezone whales lived in. Proposal 47: Dissolve the treasury and distribute pro rata to token holders. It had been a good idea, at the start. Nineteen people in a chat, most of whom had never met, pooling money to fund open-source tools for a corner of the ecosystem nobody else cared about. They'd written a constitution. They'd argued about the constitution for a month, which she'd taken as a good sign. They'd funded eleven projects in two years, small ones, a library here, a documentation site there, and three of them were still maintained, which by the standards of the space was a miracle. Then the treasury had gone up. Not because of anything they'd done. The token they'd been paid in had done what tokens do, and suddenly the pot was a number with a lot of zeroes and nineteen people had become four hundred, and the newer three hundred and eighty had opinions about what the money was for. "It's a ponzi if we don't distribute," said someone called dex_maxi in the forum thread, which was four hundred comments long now. "Treasury sitting idle is theft from holders." "It's a grants DAO," Lena had written back. "That's the whole point. It says so in the constitution." "Constitution was written by 19 people. There's 400 of us now." Which was, annoyingly, the kind of argument the constitution was supposed to answer and didn't. Yes was at 52%. Quorum was 40% of circulating and they'd cleared it an hour ago. Her own vote was in there, a no, weighted by tokens she'd been given for work she'd done in 2023 when the work was worth nothing. She'd thought about selling. She hadn't. She'd thought it would be like selling a membership card.

Her phone buzzed. Tomasz, in Warsaw, one of the nineteen. "you watching" "unfortunately" "its going to pass" "probably" "what do we do" She looked at the number. 52.3. The last big wallet to move had pushed it up two points in a single transaction, and she'd looked up the wallet, and it had bought in six weeks ago. "we take our share and start again," she typed. "smaller. no token." "no token means no treasury" "no treasury means no proposal 47" He sent a laughing emoji, which she took to mean he was as tired as she was. At 01:58 UTC it was 53.1. At 01:59 someone dumped a no vote that moved it half a point the other way and she felt a thing in her chest she was embarrassed by. At 02:00 the contract closed the vote and the page refreshed and it said PASSED and that was all it said. She sat with it. The fridge hummed. Outside a tram went past on Warschauer Strasse with nobody in it. Four hundred wallets would get a distribution in the next 48 hours, executed by code, no human in the loop. Most of them would sell. The three maintained projects would lose their funding at the end of the quarter. Somebody would write a post-mortem. Somebody always did. She opened a new chat. Added Tomasz. Added the seven others of the nineteen who still answered messages. Typed: "ok. round two. rules first this time, money never." Then she closed the laptop, because it was four in the morning, and there was a limit.