In the development of decentralized finance, how important is governance? Honestly, many early DeFi projects claim to be decentralized, but in reality, core decisions are still controlled by the team, and community governance is largely symbolic.

Walrus Protocol clearly aims to break this situation. They have designed a three-layer governance structure with a fairly clear logic: daily operational decisions are made through quick voting by token holders; major protocol upgrades follow a more rigorous process; and proposals involving fundamental rules (they call them "Constitution-level") must go through multiple debates, expert reviews, and finally a community referendum. This approach ensures broad participation while avoiding hasty decisions.

What's even more interesting is the innovation in their voting mechanism. Simple one-token-one-vote can be easily dominated by large holders, so they introduced time-weighted voting— the longer $WAL is locked, the higher the voting weight. This incentivizes long-term holders to participate in governance. They are also experimenting with including non-financial contributions, such as code contributions and documentation maintenance, into the voting weight system, allowing actual work to also earn governance rights.

What is the value of this design? The layered mechanism addresses the conflict between efficiency and democracy; the weighted voting prevents power concentration. This replicable model indeed offers valuable insights for the maturation of DAO structures.