Shares vs. Loot
Every DAO Ships ship issues two tokens, and the split between them is the heart of how membership works. One token decides who governs. The other decides who gets paid. Keeping them separate is what lets a crew reward a contributor without handing them the wheel.
The one-sentence version
Shares are voting power. Loot is economic weight without a vote. Both count toward your slice of the treasury when you leave.
Shares — the voting token
Shares (SharesERC20) are the governance token. Holding Shares gives you:
- Voting power on every proposal, weighted by how many Shares you hold.
- The ability to sponsor and submit proposals (subject to the sponsor threshold).
- A proportional claim on the treasury when you ragequit.
Shares track voting power using timestamped checkpoints, so the system can always look up exactly how much weight an address had at the moment a vote opened. This is what makes votes tamper-resistant — you cannot acquire Shares mid-vote to change a result retroactively.
Loot — the economic token
Loot (LootERC20) is the non-voting token. A Loot holder has no say in governance but
still holds a real economic stake:
- Loot counts toward your treasury payout during ragequit, exactly like Shares.
- Loot carries zero voting power — it never affects a proposal outcome.
Loot is how a DAO rewards people who should share in the upside without steering the ship:
advisors, grant recipients, early contributors, or service providers. A founder who wants to
step back from governance can even use convertSharesToLoot to turn their Shares into Loot —
keeping their economic claim while giving up their vote.
| Shares | Loot | |
|---|---|---|
| Voting power | Yes (weighted) | No |
| Counts toward ragequit payout | Yes | Yes |
| Can sponsor/submit proposals | Yes | No |
| Typical holder | Active member / crew | Advisor, contributor, investor |
Members hold both
A "member" is simply any address holding Shares, Loot, or both. Most active crew hold Shares; many also hold Loot. The two balances are tracked independently, and your total ragequit claim is based on the sum of both relative to the entire Shares-plus-Loot supply.
Delegation — lending your vote
You don't have to vote on everything yourself. Shares support delegation: you can assign your voting power to another member you trust to vote on your behalf. You keep your tokens and your economic claim — only the vote is delegated.
When Shares are first minted to a fresh address, that address is auto-delegated to itself, so new members can vote immediately without an extra step. If you ever burn all your Shares, your delegation is cleared — so if you later rejoin, you start with a clean self-delegation rather than a stale pointer to an inactive address.
Delegation at scale
In larger DAOs, delegation is how a quorum gets reached reliably. Passive holders delegate to a handful of active members, who then carry the vote. See Quorum, Grace & Retention for why that matters.
How minting works
New Shares and Loot don't appear on their own. They are minted in one of two ways:
- At launch. The founding crew receives an initial allocation when the ship is created.
- Through a Navigator or a governance proposal. A permissioned Navigator (for example, an onboarding contract that mints Shares in exchange for QUAI) or a passed governance proposal can mint to new members.
Minting is a powerful, trust-laden operation — anything that can mint can dilute everyone else. That is why minting is restricted to the MANAGER permission tier and why operators bound it with caps and allowlists. The Navigators page covers that trust model in detail.
Related
Next, see how a decision actually moves from idea to execution in the Proposal Lifecycle.