Spark CEO Sam Macpherson makes the case for sub-DAOs as a governance fix

If you’ve ever tried to get 10,000 anonymous token holders to agree on a lunch order, you have a rough idea of what governing a major DAO feels like. Sam Macpherson, CEO of Spark Protocol, thinks he’s found a better way: stop trying to make everyone agree and let competing teams fight it out instead. Macpherson’s pitch centers on the sub-DAO model, a governance architecture where the core protocol sets the rules but delegates actual operational decisions to independent sub-organizations. These sub-DAOs then compete with each other to deliver the most value back to the parent. Why flat DAOs break Macpherson has been flagging issues with flat DAO governance since 2021 and 2022, back when MakerDAO (now rebranded as Sky) was still operating under its original structure. In a flat DAO, every major decision goes through the same governance bottleneck. Token holders vote on everything from protocol parameters to marketing budgets. The result is predictable: slow decision-making, voter fatigue, and the emergence of political factions that spend more time blocking each other than building anything useful. Macpherson’s diagnosis is that factionalism in DAOs isn’t a bug to be eliminated. It’s...