Many people overlook a fundamental issue in DAO governance: when the attack cost is lower than the vault's value, hackers see the DAO as an automatic teller machine.

Imagine a scenario. A certain DeFi protocol's treasury is filled with assets, but its token market cap is surprisingly low. How much would it cost to buy out all the tokens on the secondary market? If this cost is far below the actual assets in the treasury, a governance hijack shifts from a theoretical possibility to a real threat.

This has actually happened many times. Attackers use flash loans or OTC large acquisitions to lock in 51% voting power, then propose a straightforward transfer: move the treasury funds to their own wallet. Done. The whole process looks like "normal on-chain governance," but in essence, it's pure plunder.

Take a certain protocol as an example. It has implemented time locks and long-term token locking mechanisms to increase attack difficulty. These protective measures are not just for show, but they are not impenetrable either. The real risk point is here: when the token price crashes and circulating market cap shrinks significantly, but the protocol's assets remain stable or even grow due to its business base, the gap between the two widens. Eventually, an absurd situation may occur where the circulating market cap is less than the vault's net value.

For investors, a practical monitoring indicator is: **the ratio of circulating market cap to vault net value**. When this ratio approaches 1:1 or even inverts, alarm bells should ring. Because at that point, the halo of decentralized governance fades, leaving only a vault targeted by robbers.

Don't equate decentralization with risk immunity. Numbers are the most honest.