FIO Protocol opens board‑style voting

FIO Protocol has opened its latest board election, and the voting window runs until April 15 at 2 p.m. UTC-5. That is not just a scheduling note. It is the mechanism by which FIO says its foundation should be governed: token holders vote, candidates campaign in public, and a nonprofit board is filled through an on-chain community process rather than a closed appointment behind the scenes (fio.net, fio.net). That structure is unusual because FIO is trying to graft a familiar institution onto crypto rails. The FIO Foundation is a Cayman nonprofit with a board of up to nine members, but those directors are elected by FIO token holders. The foundation’s job is broad. It manages treasury spending, funds protocol improvements, supports integrations, and promotes adoption. In other words, this is not a symbolic board. It sits close to the money and the roadmap, which makes the vote matter more than the language of “community governance” often does in crypto (fio.net, fio.net). The current election page makes that concrete. It lists candidates, biographies, countries, websites, and live vote counts. Among the names now shown are Ross Dold, Paul Puey, Luke Stokes, Leonard Scheidemantel, and Brad Spannbauer, each with vote totals already in the nine-figure range because FIO uses token-weighted voting rather than one-person-one-vote (fio.net). That is the key detail. FIO is opening the ballot to its community, but “community” here means holders of the token, and each token counts. That same logic already runs the chain itself. FIO’s Layer 1 uses delegated proof of stake, with token holders continuously voting for block producers, the operators who run the network. The top 21 active producers make blocks, and any smart-contract change requires a 15-of-21 supermajority. FIO’s board election is therefore not a side experiment. It extends the project’s existing political model from infrastructure into institutional leadership (fio.net, dev.fio.net). The company has been building toward this for a while. FIO’s own progress log says governance features were launched in the FIO App during the December 2024 board and block producer elections, giving users in-app tools to vote on the protocol’s future. The same progress page says Franck Mikulecz joined the board after a community vote, while Nicolas Mazuryk joined the steering committee, which the board appoints to define and fund specific work. The result is a layered system: token holders elect the board, the board appoints the steering committee, and the steering committee organizes itself as a DAO to coordinate execution (fio.net, fio.net, fio.net). That does not make FIO a pure democracy. The election rules on FIO’s board page say the remaining directors, up to eight of them, are selected by the existing board from the top vote-getters. So token holders do not simply fill every seat directly. They create the shortlist that the board then uses. FIO is not abolishing board discretion. It is exposing part of the nomination and selection pipeline to token holders and making that influence legible on a public ballot page that, as of this election, points to an April 15 deadline and shows vote counts updating in real time (fio.net).