I'm curious to dig into this a bit more. In general, I'm skeptical about those use cases.
* If it's a governance token system where more money == more power...well, I just don't think it's a good idea in general.
* If it's a system that tries to replicate the idea of one person/one vote, you have to have KYC (and re-KYC upon membership transfer) or it devolves into the first case. Then the entity doing KYC has centralized control over membership, so it seems like storing membership info on a ledger doesn't offer any benefits compared to just having a central membership database.
To address the latter case first: what you gain is standardization and interoperability, where the crypto toolbox acts as a protocol. Even if you're doing KYC in a centralized way, you can plug your token/DAO into any tool that supports it and use their interfaces. At least in theory. Good interfaces don't quite exist yet (it's being worked on). I'm sure there's already web2 tools out there, but the ideal web3 case is far lower friction, requiring no web hosting, deployment, trusted middlemen, etc. The proof of this will be in its success or failure, I'm still not sure how it'll play out.
Regarding the former case, of money and power... this one is a little harder. In theory, if you're a part of some community, and a very rich person wanted to fuck up or infiltrate your community by leveraging their wealth, they could probably figure out a way to do it, crypto or not. At least in this case, the existing community members stand to reap some sort of benefit from it, in the sense that a new whale's buy-in will increase the value of their existing holdings. Then they can all cash out and start a new thing someplace else. It has a similar form and moral valence as neighborhood gentrification (but without the racialized element).
I tend to think most communities will solve this by having some external aim of coordination that discourages people from just speculating (which makes sense given that social proof exists relative to the community in question), even if the balance of power is determined based on buy-in. But again, I don't really know how it will play out in practice, if more regular people will actually take up these tools for non-speculation reasons, etc.
* If it's a governance token system where more money == more power...well, I just don't think it's a good idea in general.
* If it's a system that tries to replicate the idea of one person/one vote, you have to have KYC (and re-KYC upon membership transfer) or it devolves into the first case. Then the entity doing KYC has centralized control over membership, so it seems like storing membership info on a ledger doesn't offer any benefits compared to just having a central membership database.