Why Gasless Voting Is a Double-Edged Sword

Removing the gas cost to vote eliminates the primary economic barrier to creating infinite voting identities. This forces protocols to rely on flawed, centralized identity solutions like Proof-of-Humanity or BrightID, creating new bottlenecks.

• Cost of Attack: Drops from gas * n wallets to near-zero.
• Defense Shift: From cryptoeconomic to social/algorithmic verification.
• Real Example: Early Optimism governance struggled with airdrop farmers masquerading as active voters.

While gasless voting increases raw vote counts, it often dilutes signal quality by encouraging low-conviction, low-information voting. Delegates and whales still dominate outcomes, but now obscured by noise.

• Signal-to-Noise: Participation up, but informed participation flat.
• Delegate Power: Centralizes effective power despite decentralized nominal votes.
• Protocol Impact: Compound and Uniswap see high delegation rates despite gasless features, indicating preference for expertise.

Gasless transactions require a relayer network to pay fees, creating a new central point of failure and censorship. Protocols like Snapshot with EIP-712 signatures rely on a handful of relayers (e.g., Gelato, OpenZeppelin Defender).

• Censorship Vector: Relayer can filter or reorder vote submissions.
• Cost Burden: Shifts from voters to DAO treasury, creating unsustainable subsidy models.
• Liveness Dependency: Voting fails if relayers go offline.

The fix is not removing costs, but making them strategic. Models like veTokenomics (see Curve, Balancer) or Hopeful's bonded voting tie voting power to staked, illiquid assets. This preserves sybil-resistance while allowing fee abstraction for active participants.

• Security: Attack cost tied to valuable, locked capital.
• Participation: DAO can subsidize gas for proven stakeholders.
• Alignment: Voters are financially exposed to long-term outcomes.

Gasless voting eliminates the primary cost of creating fake identities, making Sybil attacks trivial and cheap. This fundamentally breaks the one-person-one-vote assumption of many DAOs.

• Cost to Attack: Near-zero vs. ~$1-10 per vote with gas.
• Impact: Enables hostile takeovers of $1B+ DAO treasuries with minimal capital.
• Mitigation Failure: Proof-of-personhood (Worldcoin) and stake-weighted voting remain niche.

The entity sponsoring gas fees—the paymaster (e.g., Biconomy, Gelato)—becomes a centralized censor and failure point. They can selectively filter or frontrun transactions.

• Censorship Power: Paymaster can blacklist proposals or voters.
• Systemic Risk: A bug or exploit in a dominant paymaster halts all governance.
• Market Reality: Top 3 paymasters control >60% of sponsored transactions.

Zero-cost voting increases quantity but destroys quality. It incentivizes low-effort, uninformed voting and pushes users towards lazy delegation to default entities (e.g., Coinbase, Lido).

• Vote Dilution: Meaningful community signal is drowned in noise.
• Power Consolidation: Default delegates amass voting power >20%, recreating plutocracy.
• Data Point: Snapshot votes with gasless entry see >70% participation but <5% thoughtful engagement.

By abstracting away the native token for fees, gasless systems sever the critical feedback loop between network usage and token value. This undermines the security budget of the underlying chain.

• Security Erosion: Validator/staker rewards don't scale with governance activity.
• Example: An L2 with $10B TVL in gasless apps generates $0 in sequencer fees from governance.
• Long-term Effect: Weakens cryptoeconomic security for application-layer convenience.

Delegating gas payment to relayers (e.g., Snapshot's Execution Strategies, Tally) creates a single point of failure and censorship. The entity funding the transaction becomes a de facto gatekeeper.

• Risk: A malicious or coerced relayer can selectively censor or reorder votes.
• Mitigation: Use a permissionless, incentivized relayer network like Ethereum's PBS model to prevent capture.

Gasless voting removes the primary economic cost (gas) that previously disincentivized Sybil attacks. An attacker can spin up millions of wallets for the cost of signatures, not transactions.

• Attack Surface: Vote bribing and governance attacks become orders of magnitude cheaper.
• Solution: Mandate proof-of-personhood (Worldcoin, BrightID) or capital-at-stake (like ERC20Votes) layered on top of the gasless signature.

Gasless votes are off-chain signatures; their on-chain execution is delayed and asynchronous. This creates a dangerous gap between voter intent and chain state.

• Problem: A voter's tokens could be delegated away or sold after signing but before execution, violating the vote's legitimacy.
• Architecture Fix: Implement state checks at execution time (like OpenZeppelin's Governor) to revert invalid votes, or use intent-based settlement patterns from UniswapX.

Signed vote messages are public before execution, creating a new frontrunning vector. A malicious actor can see a large vote, copy the signature, and pay gas to execute it first, stealing the voting power.

• Vulnerability: Similar to MEV in DEXs, but for governance.
• Prevention: Use commit-reveal schemes or encrypted mempools (like Shutter Network) to hide vote content until execution.

Gasless voting platforms like Snapshot often operate on a single chain (e.g., Ethereum Mainnet), while governance tokens and voters are spread across Layer 2s (Arbitrum, Optimism) and sidechains.

• Friction: Voters on L2s must still sign messages rooted to L1, creating UX complexity.
• Future State: Adopt omnichain messaging (LayerZero, CCIP) or L2-native governance stacks to unify the voting landscape.

The protocol treasury ultimately bears the gas cost for execution, creating a tragedy of the commons. High participation can lead to unbounded, unpredictable operational costs.

• Budget Risk: A contentious proposal could trigger a gas war, draining the treasury.
• Sustainable Design: Implement gas refunds (EIP-4337), relayer auctions, or participation staking to align incentives and cap costs.