Every DAO in the index passes the humans test. Thirty-one of fifty-two fail the governance one.

HPR — the share of real humans behind the voting wallets — ranges from 9.56 to 10.00 across all 52 tracked DAOs this week. Forty of them score exactly 10.00. Over the same set, 31 score below 1.00 on delegate engagement and 24 below 0.50. In this cohort the sybil problem is effectively solved. The governance problem is wide open.

DGI Composite: 5.90

Down 0.05 from 5.96 last week. Snapshot dates: 2026-10-04 against 2026-09-27, with all 52 tracked DAOs present at both — full coverage, no gap to disclose.

Category	Composite	Prev	Δ WoW	DAOs
DeFi	5.96	6.01	-0.05	34
All tracked	5.90	5.96	-0.05	52
Infrastructure	5.88	5.88	-0.01	8
Social	5.86	6.03	-0.17	6
Public Goods	5.54	5.55	0.00	4

Social takes the week's sharpest category hit, and it is one DAO wearing a category costume: of six Social DAOs, three moved at all, and Aavegotchi's -0.96 accounts for almost the entire -0.17.

Movers

Up: StakeDAO +0.26 · Rocket Pool +0.24 · Uniswap +0.16 · CoW DAO +0.16 · Arbitrum +0.15 · Olympus DAO +0.14 · Lido +0.11

Down: Aavegotchi -0.96 · Parallel -0.54 · ShapeShift -0.49 · Compound -0.37 · Balancer -0.36 · Across DAO -0.21 · Convex Finance -0.20 · Redbelly Network -0.20

Nine DAOs up, 16 down, 27 flat at exactly 0.00. The largest gain anywhere in the index was +0.26, against +1.28 last week and +1.32 the week before. Only two DAOs moved by half a point or more, and both moved down.

ShapeShift drops out of the top 10 to rank 13. Superfluid enters at 10. Wormhole takes the top spot from Balancer without moving at all.

The index has no middle

Twenty-eight of 52 tracked DAOs — 54 percent — score between 5.42 and 5.66. That is a 0.24-point band holding more than half the index. All 28 have delegate engagement below 1.00. Seventeen of them carry a PDI of exactly 5.00 and a GPI of exactly 5.00.

Those are not scores. They are the shape of nothing happening.

At the other end, eight DAOs clear 5.00 on delegate engagement: Wormhole 8.75, Lido 6.67, Arbitrum 6.34, Uniswap 5.51, Compound 5.49, Aave DAO 5.17, StakeDAO 5.02, Balancer 5.00. Between those eight and the band of 28 sit sixteen DAOs with partial activity. Governance in this cohort is not a spectrum. It is a cliff with a crowd at the bottom.

Aavegotchi shows how a DAO goes over the edge, and how little it takes.

It holds the highest GPI in the entire index at 7.28 and the third-highest PDI at 6.06. Its token distribution is genuinely broad — broader than Uniswap's, broader than Lido's. Last week it ranked third. This week it ranks eighth, down 0.96, and 0.90 points of that loss are delegate engagement alone: DEI 5.22 to 1.60, worth 0.905 at a 25 percent weight. PDI moved 0.30. GPI did not move at all.

Nothing about Aavegotchi's structure changed. The structure was never what was carrying it.

That is the finding worth taking out of this edition. Broad token distribution does not produce governance. It produces the capacity for governance. Delegate engagement is what converts capacity into decisions, and it is the only GVS component that separates this cohort at all — HPR spans 0.44 points across 52 DAOs, while DEI spans 8.70. One quiet week in the delegate forums costs five ranks. A well-distributed DAO with silent delegates and a concentrated DAO with silent delegates land in the same 0.24-point band, and the band is where DAOs drift by default.

Any index built on turnout would miss every word of this. A DAO at the bottom of that band can report a 60 percent participation rate and still score 5.5, because turnout counts ballots and says nothing about who cast them or whether anyone deliberated before doing so. HPR asks whether there is a human behind the wallet. DEI asks whether that human comes back. Wallets lie. We don't.

Leaderboard — Top 10

#	DAO	Category	GVS	HPR	DEI	PDI	GPI	Δ WoW
1	Wormhole	DeFi	7.69	10.00	8.75	5.00	5.00	0.00
2	Balancer	DeFi	7.45	10.00	5.00	6.26	7.24	-0.36
3	Arbitrum	Infrastructure	7.12	9.94	6.34	5.04	5.23	+0.15
4	Lido	DeFi	6.91	10.00	6.67	4.28	4.41	+0.11
5	StakeDAO	DeFi	6.87	10.00	5.02	4.74	5.86	+0.26
6	Uniswap	DeFi	6.68	10.00	5.51	4.52	4.51	+0.16
7	GnosisDAO	DeFi	6.62	10.00	3.31	5.08	6.41	+0.03
8	Aavegotchi	Social	6.57	10.00	1.60	6.06	7.28	-0.96
9	Frax Finance	DeFi	6.50	10.00	3.28	3.66	7.24	-0.01
10	Superfluid	DeFi	6.30	10.00	1.70	5.17	6.71	-0.11

30-day view

Twenty-nine of 52 DAOs have a comparable snapshot 30 days back, so this is a partial picture of the index, not all of it.

Up: Compound +0.61 · Uniswap +0.49 · 1inch Network +0.38 · Parallel +0.35 · Arbitrum +0.21 · Morpho +0.18

Down: Gearbox -1.11 · ENS -0.97 · Aavegotchi -0.93 · Frax Finance -0.91 · Balancer -0.56 · Redbelly Network -0.36

Over 30 days, Compound's +0.61 and Uniswap's +0.49 both came from delegate engagement climbing into the top eight. Gearbox and ENS lost ground the same way, in reverse. The cliff is not a static formation — DAOs do cross it. They cross it in one direction at a time, and they cross it on delegate activity, not on token distribution.

Methodology

The GVS weights Human Participation Rate at 35 percent, Delegate Engagement Index at 25 percent, Power Dynamics Index at 20 percent and Grassroots Participation Index at 20 percent. The DGI Composite is the equal-weighted mean of GVS across all tracked DAOs that have not opted out and that carry data at both snapshot dates. Full methodology: chainsights.one/methodology

Check your own DAO

Run a free Governance Vitality Score on any tracked DAO and see the component breakdown behind the number: chainsights.one

Building on the data? The ChainSights API serves GVS history, component scores and delegate activity as JSON, with the same snapshot cadence this newsletter runs on: chainsights.one/api

DGI Weekly #15: The Index Has No Middle