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Mezo Documentation

Voting Overview

Mezo’s governance model is simple: lock your commitment, earn the right to direct the protocol’s future. Through voting, veBTC holders capture the economic value of emissions and determine where the chain’s value is allocated.

How Voting Works

When you lock BTC, you receive voting power tokenized as an NFT. Each week (epoch), you may allocate that power across different gauges—pools like BTC/MUSD, the MUSD Savings Rate, or other protocol functions. The gauges you vote for receive a proportional share of total mats emissions for that epoch.

More emissions attract more liquidity providers. More liquidity can increase trading volume, which can increase fees. Those fees flow back to you—the voter—creating a positive feedback loop where your influence grows in tandem with protocol success.

What You Earn

Trading Fees: 100% of fees generated by pools you vote for, distributed proportionally. If you allocated 1% of a gauge’s votes and that pool generated 50,000infees,youearn50,000 in fees, you earn 500.

Incentives: External protocols deposit incentives to attract votes toward their preferred gauges. These are split among all voters on that gauge, creating a secondary revenue stream.

This creates a market for votes. Protocols compete to attract your voting power, and you capture the value of that competition.

Voting Power and Decay

Your voting power decays linearly as your lock approaches expiration. Lock 1 BTC for 28 days, and your initial power is 1.0, decaying continuously until it reaches zero at expiration. This ensures active participation and prevents stale votes from dominating governance.

To maintain your voting power, extend your lock periodically. See Managing Locks for details.

The Weekly Epoch

Mezo operates in 7-day epochs starting Thursday at 00:00 UTC. Each epoch is a fresh cycle for voting power, fees, and incentives.

The cycle:

  1. Epoch begins
  2. You cast votes throughout the week
  3. Epoch ends and votes are tallied
  4. Mats emissions distributed to gauges based on votes
  5. Fees and incentives become claimable
  6. Repeat

Critical: Votes don’t carry over. If you don’t vote in a given epoch, you forfeit your share of fees and incentives for that week.

Epoch Alignment

Lock durations are aligned to epoch boundaries and rounded down to the nearest full week. This means:

  • A 28-day max lock created mid-epoch will have an effective duration of approximately 21–28 days, depending on when you lock
  • Locks always expire at epoch transitions (Thursday 00:00 UTC)

This ensures voting weight calculations remain consistent across the system.

Choosing Where to Vote

Different gauges offer different opportunities. Some factors you may consider when allocating votes:

  • Trading volume and fee generation
  • Incentives posted by protocols
  • Total votes already allocated to a gauge
  • Your own priorities for the Mezo ecosystem

Monitor gauge weights, fee generation, and incentive markets each epoch to inform your decisions.

Next Steps

Ready to start voting? See How to Vote for the complete walkthrough.