Written by: Tia, Techub News
In the current landscape where stablecoins and RWA have become everyday topics in the industry, DAOs seem to have faded from the media spotlight. But let’s not forget that there was a time when DAOs were the white moonlight in the hearts of countless crypto idealists, seen as the ultimate form of decentralization. Decentralization not only means putting code on-chain but also moving governance from corporate boards to the community.
From the maturity of toolchains to the diversification of organizational forms, DAOs have not been stagnant over the years—voting tools like Snapshot and Tally have made expression more convenient, practices such as delegated voting, secondary voting, and working groups have broken down "participation" into more actionable segments, and different types of attempts like Service DAOs, Investment DAOs, and Protocol DAOs are exploring more suitable governance forms within their boundaries.
However, when Scroll DAO announced a "pause" in governance, accompanied by the departure of several core members, this event once again brought the ideals and realities of DAOs back into the spotlight.
On September 11, 2025, Scroll officially announced the suspension of DAO governance, with a mass resignation from the leadership team, including co-founder Haichen Shen and several community representatives. Meanwhile, proposals already in progress within the DAO, such as the "Timelock Test" and "DAO Treasury Management RFP," have come to a standstill. Some community representatives, like Olimpio, even reported being silenced and removed from Discord, further intensifying the conflict between governance and the community.
The Full Picture of Scroll DAO's Governance Suspension
To clarify this matter, we first need to observe Scroll's governance structure and the specific issues currently at hand. Scroll's governance is not a castle in the air: it has a written constitution and details the voting, proposals, timelock, and execution paths—through technical and procedural constraints like a three-day voting delay and a three-day timelock, it separates the time windows for "voting" and "execution" to reduce passive risks and provide the community with space to respond.
In recent weeks, the Scroll community has been pushing several time-consuming and critical engineering proposals: including a request for proposals for DAO treasury management (DAO Treasury Management RFP), a low-cost timelock test to validate automated execution processes (Timelock Test), and an organizational proposal for establishing a Governance Council. The purpose of these proposals is not minor adjustments but to advance the DAO from more "human intervention" towards a more automated and institutionalized direction.
However, it is precisely at this sensitive moment of "preparing to automate and institutionalize governance" that governance was put on pause. The immediate manifestation of the event is that some governance leaders (multiple key personnel mentioned in reports) have resigned, community representatives announced on social media that governance would be paused, and while several ongoing voting issues remain online, it has become unclear who will push for execution. A well-known community representative, Olimpio, was the first to announce on X that governance would be "paused." Unfortunately, reports indicated that some community representatives were unable to access official discussion channels (like Discord) at a critical moment, and this communication breakdown amplified feelings of distrust.
Delving deeper into the surface, we can see several tightly interwoven threads. First, there is the question of "can decisions be executed." In Scroll's design, voting is merely a trigger: some proposals (such as actually pushing funds into the timelock or executing payments from the timelock) require infrastructure validation and operational collaboration.
In practice, this often necessitates a responsible operations/governance team to connect off-chain operations with on-chain actions. The Timelock Test was intended to conduct a clean, low-risk rehearsal of this pathway, allowing the DAO to safely entrust more budget to automated execution mechanisms; but when the personnel responsible for advancing these rehearsals leave, or when the boundaries of the governance team's responsibilities become blurred, even if voting passes, execution may stall. In other words, a passed vote does not equate to implementation, and the "vacuum" on the execution side can turn approved decisions into pending cases.
Redesign Governance, Who Will Change Governance?
Secondly, there is the controversy over "who will change governance." The Scroll official statement includes the phrase "redesign governance," and founders or senior management have mentioned the need to re-examine the governance framework in external communications; however, "redesign" without a clear roadmap, timeline, and broad community participation can easily be interpreted as a top-down reclamation and reconstruction, thereby intensifying community concerns about transparency and the risk of power re-concentration. The community's immediate reaction indicates that the current atmosphere leans more towards anxiety: some worry that treasury proposals may be shelved due to lack of execution, others fear that the governance delegation/representation mechanism may be exploited without sufficient accountability, and some express dissatisfaction with how the team has handled community representatives in key communication channels.
This exposes a typical tension in the evolution of governance: the balance between decentralized ideals, specialized execution, and trust is always difficult to grasp. Scroll attempts to write responsibilities into the constitution and technify execution processes (timelock, modular governance strategies), which is a common path for many mature DAOs. However, technical rules do not automatically generate organizational culture and communication mechanisms. The dynamics of community governance involve not only "contracts and voting" but also public opinion, delegation relationships, the social capital of representatives, and the imagination and suspicion about "who is operating behind the scenes." Once one party chooses to pause and internally reorganize without an immediately visible transparent mechanism to soothe and explain, trust fractures can quickly emerge. It has been proven that a visible bridge is still needed between technical governance design and community governance practice.
In terms of short-term impact, several proposals already online (such as the Timelock Test, DAO Treasury Management RFP, and the establishment of the Governance Council) have indeed fallen into an awkward "disconnection between approval and execution" zone: voting results may no longer have immediate execution value, and the treasury funds and allocation paths have thus been marked with uncertainty. For ecological partners and projects expecting funding, this means delayed fund disbursement and shelved ecological plans, which in turn affects the confidence and cooperation rhythm of external allies; for token holders, governance stagnation equates to a loss of immediate control over funds and direction for a period of time. Media and governance monitoring agencies are also closely tracking the direction and voting status of these proposals to assess the event's long-term impact on the project's health.
Returning to the institutional level, the lesson from Scroll's case is not a revolutionary discovery but a comprehensive presentation of the recurring old problems of DAOs: governance rules, execution mechanisms, and communication transparency must stand on three legs; any weakening of one leg will shake the overall balance. Scroll is working to put more processes on-chain and into the timelock, which theoretically reduces the subjectivity of human intervention, but in practice requires a stable, community-trusted execution team as a bridge; otherwise, "decentralized process" will only turn into "unsupervised automation." Additionally, any decision regarding "redesigning governance" should come with a clear transition plan: who is responsible for the treasury during the pause? How will unexecuted proposals be protected or re-examined? How can representatives removed from communication channels appeal? Without these transitional rules, a governance pause could turn short-term repair needs into long-term legitimacy gaps.
Therefore, digging deep into Scroll's "pause button," the core is not to find a single culprit but to see a set of systemic contradictions erupting simultaneously at a sensitive moment: when governance is ready to move from "manual changes" to "verifiable automated execution," the stability of the execution team, community trust, and smooth communication become decisive variables. Scroll's next path has two extreme possibilities: one is to treat the pause as a sincere governance audit, publicly disclose the timeline, designate transition mechanisms, and have third-party or multiple representatives jointly supervise the reconstruction process, thereby transforming this crisis into an upgrade of governance systems; the other is to use "redesign" as a pretext for top management to reclaim power, falling short on transparency and accountability, ultimately leading to a relative concentration of governance power, gradually eroding the community's willingness to participate and its legitimacy. The media and community are closely watching which path Scroll chooses.
The Alarm of Governance: The Importance of Execution, Transparency, and Transition Mechanisms
Putting the details of Scroll back into the larger DAO discussion, the conclusion is neither complex nor hopeless. The value of DAOs lies in their attempt to decentralize power and involve users of public goods in decision-making; to ensure that such a system can exist stably in reality, both "continuity of the execution chain" and "transparent transition mechanisms" must be written into governance design. In other words, voting must translate into auditable, accountable execution; significant changes must be accompanied by clear transitions and oversight; the communication rights and appeal channels of community representatives cannot become variables that can be arbitrarily closed. Scroll's pause has sounded a not-new but essential alarm for the industry: the technicalization of governance systems is not the final answer; the socialization, proceduralization, and correctability of governance systems are the true lifelines.
Any project intending to "upgrade" or "reconstruct" at the governance level should first draft a transparent transition agreement, clearly outlining the treasury and service downgrade plans during the pause, designate temporary supervisory committee members, and ensure communication and appeal channels for community representatives; secondly, when aiming for automated execution (such as putting money into the timelock), it should first make "rehearsals" a routine, reproducible standard operation (like Scroll's 1 SCR timelock test, which is a good practice), and ensure there are stable responsible individuals to complete these rehearsals; finally, introducing third-party reviews or multi-representative supervision during any significant governance changes can significantly reduce the community's fear of "backroom reconstruction," thereby maintaining the legitimacy and trust capital of participation. These are not universal solutions, but in Scroll's current situation, if they can be earnestly adhered to, they can minimize the costs of a governance crisis and lay a healthier foundation for subsequent institutional evolution.
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