Introduction
Blockchain makes rules, transactions, and balances radically legible. In decentralized finance, that hyper-legibility combines with low switching costs to make exit easier than in traditional institutions. Participants can observe a protocol in real time and move capital elsewhere when trust weakens.
This report asks how a protocol can create reasons to stay when exit is always available. It calls that property institutional viscosity: not a barrier that traps participants, but a social and institutional capacity to delay immediate exit long enough for judgment, coordination, and repair.
The governance experiments of MakerDAO (now Sky), Uniswap, and Yearn Finance show that code and automated rules alone were not enough. Communities that experienced crises have institutionalized practical judgment, emergency response, delegated expertise, and accumulated memory alongside technical rules.
Viscosity is therefore not friction for its own sake. It is inherited institutional learning: a protocol's ability to turn past failures into procedures that help participants remain, deliberate, and act together. In a system anyone may leave, governance succeeds when it gives people a credible reason to stay.
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