Hello everyone, Carl here from Wheelhaus Labs.
As Moonwell prepares to migrate to a simplified governance framework running entirely on Base, I’d like to surface a related idea that could strengthen governance participation and better align incentives across the protocol: shifting governance from the WELL token to the stkWELL token.
Today, the majority of Moonwell DAO’s economic weight and community participation is centered on stkWELL, not WELL. Most users stake WELL to earn rewards, and this has resulted in governance power becoming overwhelmingly concentrated in stkWELL, even though stkWELL holders currently cannot delegate. This leaves the active delegate ecosystem constrained as high-context, engaged delegates simply cannot scale their influence because the primary governance supply is locked in a non-delegatable form. Meanwhile, the WELL supply is very lightly delegated: only 4.77M WELL is delegated to someone other than oneself, while 632.6M stkWELL is held by addresses that have participated in governance at least once.
Here are some relevant figures to illustrate the imbalance:
-
Total delegated WELL: 43.85M
• Self-delegated: 39.08M
• Delegated to others: 4.77M
• Non self delegations count with > 0 tokens: 227 -
Total stkWELL supply: 1.01B
• stkWELL held by addresses that have ever voted: 632.6M
• stkWELL holders: 10,194
• Number of stkWELL holders who have ever voted: 3,797
These numbers show that the true base of governance power is already stkWELL, not WELL and that only a tiny fraction of delegatable WELL is actually delegated in a meaningful way. As a result, governance participation is structurally flatter than it needs to be, and delegates cannot meaningfully accumulate delegated vote power.
With the DAO already discussing and preparing for a major change to the governance architecture via a new Base-native Governor, this is the most logical moment to line up the governance token with the protocol’s real economic foundation. Moving to stkWELL would strengthen decentralization, empower engaged delegates, and align governance with where users already choose to hold their WELL. We could technically allow delegation for both WELL and stkWELL, but that would introduce unnecessary complexity in my opinion. Concentrating governance at the stkWELL layer is much cleaner and matches where almost all tokens reside.
I’d love to hear thoughts on whether the DAO should explore this transition as part of the upcoming governance upgrade.
— Carl / Wheelhaus Labs