The DGI Composite moved 0.01 this week. 1inch Network moved 1.32.

Flat index, violent components. That is what a governance market looks like when the headline number has stopped being the story.

The index

DGI Composite: 6.00 — previous week 5.99, delta +0.01.

51 DAOs qualified, meaning they carry data on both reference dates: 2026-09-13 and 2026-09-20.

Two weeks running, the Composite has moved by less than a twentieth of a point. The Composite is an equal-weighted average across every tracked DAO, and an average is exactly as boring as the distribution underneath it is narrow. This week the distribution was not narrow at all.

Movers of the week

DAO	GVS	WoW
1inch Network	6.87	+1.32
Parallel	6.31	+0.57
Angle Protocol	5.55	+0.50
Morpho	5.98	+0.28
GnosisDAO	6.69	+0.26
Arbitrum	7.09	+0.23

Down

DAO	GVS	WoW
Lido	5.52	-1.39
Frax Finance	6.64	-0.76
Gearbox	6.29	-0.35
ENS	6.37	-0.24
Alchemix	5.44	-0.13
Gitcoin	5.42	-0.12

1inch Network posted the largest gain of the week and moved into rank 8 on a Delegate Engagement Index of 6.08 — the fourth-highest DEI in the entire tracked set. Delegates showed up and voted.

Lido did the opposite, and did it harder: -1.39, nearly twice the next-worst decline, and out of the top ten entirely. Here is the part that matters. Lido's Human Participation Rate is 10.00 — the ceiling. A score cannot lose ground on a component that is already maxed out, so the entire drop came from the other three: delegate engagement (1.24), power concentration (4.28), grassroots participation (4.27). The wallets behind Lido governance are human. They simply stopped governing.

That is the distinction this index exists to make. A vote count would have shown you a quiet week. It would not have shown you which kind of quiet.

Where the spread actually comes from

One number explains this leaderboard better than the leaderboard does.

Across all 51 tracked DAOs, the Human Participation Rate spans 9.56 to 10.00. Delegate Engagement spans 0.05 to 8.75.

One of those metrics differentiates. The other has stopped.

HPR — the share of voting power with a verified human behind it — has converged near the ceiling across the entire set. Sybil resistance is not what separates strong governance from weak governance right now, at least not among DAOs that have opted into being measured. Delegate engagement is, and the picture there is brutal: 32 of 51 DAOs score below 2.0. Twenty-nine score below 1.0. Curve Finance sits at 0.05.

Watch what that does to the bottom of the table. The last 26 DAOs on this leaderboard are separated by 0.18 GVS points — twenty-six protocols, most of them names you would recognise, statistically indistinguishable from one another.

And 18 of the 51 report exactly 5.00 on both power concentration and grassroots participation. Exactly. To two decimals. A governance metric that never moves is not measuring stability. It is telling you there is nothing underneath to measure.

The top of the table is not winning on token distribution or on wallet hygiene. Balancer and Curve both post an HPR of 10.00. Balancer's DEI is 8.10; Curve's is 0.05. That single gap is worth 2.43 points of GVS between them, and it is essentially the whole difference.

Delegation was supposed to be the fix for voter apathy — hand your power to someone who will use it. For two thirds of this set, delegation is where the power went to sit down.

Leaderboard — Top 10

#	DAO	Category	GVS	HPR	DEI	PDI	GPI	WoW
1	Balancer	DeFi	7.94	10.00	8.10	4.88	7.18	+0.06
2	Wormhole	DeFi	7.69	10.00	8.75	5.00	5.00	0.00
3	Aavegotchi	Social	7.43	10.00	5.27	5.76	7.32	+0.21
4	StakeDAO	DeFi	7.15	10.00	5.37	5.51	6.03	-0.02
5	Arbitrum	Infrastructure	7.09	9.82	6.00	5.67	5.09	+0.23
6	ShapeShift	DeFi	6.98	10.00	6.16	5.97	3.76	+0.07
7	Compound	DeFi	6.97	10.00	5.37	6.00	4.63	+0.11
8	1inch Network	DeFi	6.87	10.00	6.08	4.65	4.60	+1.32
9	GnosisDAO	DeFi	6.69	10.00	3.72	4.89	6.41	+0.26
10	Frax Finance	DeFi	6.64	10.00	3.81	3.63	7.28	-0.76

Every DAO in this top ten carries a DEI above 3.7. No DAO outside the top twenty does.

30-day view

Comparison against the reference snapshot 30 days back. 25 of 51 DAOs carry a value that far out; the rest joined tracking more recently.

DAO	30-day delta
Balancer	+1.44
Parallel	+1.27
ShapeShift	+0.89
GnosisDAO	+0.73
Morpho	+0.60
Lido	-1.32
Frax Finance	-1.13
Botto	-0.60
Gearbox	-0.57
ENS	-0.55

Balancer has added 1.44 points in a month and leads the table again this week. Lido has given back 1.32, almost all of it in the last seven days.

Category snapshot

Category	Composite	Prev	Delta	DAOs
DeFi	6.07	6.04	+0.02	33
Social	6.05	6.02	+0.03	6
All tracked	6.00	5.99	+0.01	51
Infrastructure	5.93	5.93	0.00	8
Public Goods	5.55	5.58	-0.03	4

Public Goods is the only category that lost ground this week, and at 5.55 it sits furthest below the all-tracked line of any category.

Check your own DAO

Run a free Governance Vitality Score on any tracked DAO — HPR, DEI, PDI and GPI, no signup: chainsights.one/free-check

Need the numbers in your own dashboard? The ChainSights API serves scores, components and historical snapshots as JSON: chainsights.one/api

Methodology

The Governance Vitality Score weights Human Participation Rate at 35 %, Delegate Engagement at 25 %, Power Dynamics at 20 % and Grassroots Participation at 20 %. The DGI Composite is the equal-weighted average of GVS across every DAO with data on both reference dates. Full methodology: https://chainsights.one/methodology

Reference dates for this edition: current 2026-09-20, previous 2026-09-13.

Everyone can count votes. We count who is behind them.

DGI Weekly #13: The Index Moved 0.01. One DAO Moved 1.32.