  Decentralised organisations use blockchains as a basis for governance: they
use on-chain transactions to allocate voting weight, publish proposals, cast
votes, and enact the results.
  However, blockchain-based governance structures have challenges, mostly
notably, the need to align the short-term outlook of pseudononymous voters with
the long-term growth and success of the decentralised organisation. The
Vote-Escrowed Token (veToken) model attempts to resolve this tension by
requiring voters to escrow or lock tokens of value for an extended period in
exchange for voting weight.
  In this paper, we describe the veToken model and analyse its emergent
outcomes. We show that voting behaviour follows bribes set by higher-level
protocols, and that the cost per vote varies depending on how it is acquired.
We describe the implementation of the veToken model by Curve Finance, a popular
automated market maker for stablecoins, and the ecosystem of protocols that has
arisen on top of this implementation. We show that voting markets such as
Votium largely determine the outcome of fortnightly votes held by Convex
Finance, and we show that Frax Finance, a stablecoin issuer, plays a central
role in the ecosystem even though they directly lock relatively few tokens with
Curve. Instead, they indirectly lock tokens through yield aggregators such as
Convex Finance and purchase voting weight through voting markets such as
Votium.
  Although the veToken model in isolation is straight-forward and easily
explained, it leads to many complex and emergent outcomes. Decentralised
organisations should consider these outcomes before adopting the model.
