A decentralised autonomous organisation votes on proposals, but a vote is only a count of signatures. What matters is whether the result is connected to anything that can act.
Voting weight comes from token holdings
Governance tokens assign voting power in proportion to balance, recorded at a snapshot block so that tokens cannot be borrowed for a vote and returned afterwards.
Delegation lets holders assign their weight to someone who follows proposals closely, which concentrates influence among a small number of active delegates.
Participation is typically low, so passing a proposal often depends on a handful of large holders and delegates rather than on broad turnout.
Off-chain voting is a signal, not an instruction
Many organisations count votes through signed messages rather than transactions, which costs nothing and encourages participation.
Those signatures prove who voted and how, but they do not move anything, so a separate step is required to act on the result.
That step is usually a multisignature wallet operated by a small group who are trusted to implement what passed.
On-chain execution removes the intermediary
A proposal can instead be submitted as the exact transaction to be executed, with voting held in a contract that will run it if the threshold is met.
Nobody has to be trusted to implement the outcome, because the outcome is the transaction and passing the vote is what triggers it.
The cost is rigidity: the proposal has to be written as executable code before voting, and errors cannot be corrected during implementation.
Timelocks exist so members can react
Approved actions are commonly queued for a fixed delay before they execute, making the pending change publicly visible.
The delay gives anyone who disagrees an opportunity to withdraw funds or organise opposition before the change takes effect.
It also constrains emergency responses, which is why many organisations keep a separate mechanism for pausing contracts quickly under narrower authority.
Authority is defined by what the contracts permit
A vote can only produce effects the contracts allow, so the real scope of governance is whatever privileged functions exist and who is permitted to call them.
Reading those permissions shows whether holders control the treasury and the protocol parameters, or whether they are advising a group that retains the keys.
The distinction is frequently invisible in the published governance process and entirely visible in the deployed code.