Voting is a transaction bottleneck. Every proposal vote requires a user to sign and pay for an on-chain transaction, creating prohibitive gas costs and latency that kills participation.
public-goods-funding-and-quadratic-voting
Blog
Why Current Voting Infrastructure Fails at Scale
On-chain governance is a bottleneck, not a solution. We analyze the technical and UX failures—gas costs, cross-chain friction, and complexity—that limit participation to a tiny, unrepresentative cohort, undermining the promise of decentralized decision-making.
introduction
THE FAILURE
Introduction
On-chain voting infrastructure is fundamentally broken for high-frequency, cross-chain governance.
Cross-chain governance is impossible. A DAO on Arbitrum cannot natively poll its members on Polygon or Base, fracturing communities and creating governance silos worse than the liquidity fragmentation it aims to solve.
Snapshot is a band-aid, not a cure. While Snapshot enables gasless off-chain signaling, its votes are non-binding and require a separate, vulnerable multi-sig execution step, introducing centralization and execution risk.
Evidence: The largest DAOs, like Uniswap and Aave, see voter turnout below 10% for critical proposals, and cross-chain governance remains a theoretical concept, not a shipped product.
key-trends
THE SCALING BOTTLENECK
Executive Summary
Current on-chain voting systems are buckling under the weight of their own success, creating systemic risks and user apathy.
01
The Gas Wall: Prohibitively Expensive Participation
Voting on-chain is a luxury good. A single proposal on a major DAO can cost a user $50-$500+ in gas, disenfranchising all but the wealthiest token holders. This creates plutocratic outcomes and stifles grassroots governance.
- Result: <1% voter turnout is common, even in multi-billion dollar DAOs like Uniswap or Aave.
- Consequence: Proposals are decided by a tiny, unrepresentative cohort, undermining legitimacy.
$500+
Max Cost
<1%
Avg. Turnout
02
The Latency Trap: Snapshot's Centralized Crutch
Off-chain voting platforms like Snapshot solved the gas cost problem but introduced a fatal trade-off: signaling without execution. Votes are mere promises, requiring a separate, vulnerable multi-sig transaction to enact. This creates days of execution lag and a centralization bottleneck.
- Result: 24-72 hour delay between vote conclusion and on-chain execution.
- Consequence: Creates arbitrage windows for MEV and requires blind trust in proposers to execute the will of the DAO.
24-72h
Execution Lag
1-of-N
Trust Model
03
The Composability Failure: Isolated Governance Silos
Each protocol's governance is a walled garden. A user with stakes in Compound, Aave, and Uniswap must manage separate identities, gas wallets, and interfaces for each. There is no cross-protocol vote delegation or aggregated voting power, fracturing influence and attention.
- Result: Zero governance composability across the DeFi stack.
- Consequence: Voter fatigue, misaligned incentives, and inability to coordinate cross-protocol strategies (e.g., unified stablecoin policy).
N Interfaces
Per Voter
0
Cross-Protocol
04
The Security Mirage: Snapshot & Key Management Risks
The dominant signing method—direct wallet signing for Snapshot—is a phishing honeypot and exposes users to unlimited approval risks. Meanwhile, secure smart contract wallets (Safe, Argent) are often incompatible, forcing a choice between safety and participation. Custodians like Coinbase or Binance control ~30%+ of circulating supply for major tokens, creating centralized veto points.
- Result: Users choose between security theater and total abstention.
- Consequence: Real voting power is concentrated with the least-aligned entities: CEXs and reckless whales.
30%+
CEX Control
High
Phishing Risk
thesis-statement
THE UX BOTTLENECK
The Core Failure: Friction as a Feature
Current governance systems treat user friction as a necessary evil, creating a structural barrier to participation that undermines decentralization.
Gas fees are a participation tax. Every vote requires a direct, on-chain transaction, making governance a pay-to-play system that excludes users during high network congestion or for low-value proposals.
Wallet fatigue destroys engagement. Users must manually connect wallets, sign transactions, and navigate disparate interfaces for each DAO, a process that fails at scale across hundreds of protocols.
Snapshot solves nothing. While off-chain voting platforms like Snapshot reduce gas costs, they create a two-tier governance system where off-chain signals lack finality and require a separate, trusted execution step.
Evidence: Less than 5% of token holders vote in major DAOs. The Uniswap airdrop created 250k+ delegates, but daily active voters rarely exceed 5k, proving that lowering cost alone does not solve engagement.
VOTING INFRASTRUCTURE
The Friction Tax: A Comparative Cost Analysis
A breakdown of the tangible costs and limitations of dominant on-chain voting models, quantifying the 'friction tax' on governance.
| Governance Friction Metric | Snapshot (Off-Chain) | Compound/Aave (On-Chain) | Optimistic DAOs (e.g., Optimism) |
|---|---|---|---|
Vote Finality Latency | ~5 sec (IPFS) | ~12 sec (L1 block) | ~7 days (challenge period) |
Cost per Vote (Avg Gas, Mainnet) | $0 | $50-$150 | $0 (off-chain) + $500-$2k (on-chain execution) |
Execution Automation | |||
Sybil Resistance Mechanism | Token-weighted (off-chain) | Token-weighted (on-chain) | Token-weighted (off-chain) |
Max Voter Throughput (Votes/sec) |
| ~15 (Ethereum block gas limit) |
|
State Change Finality | Requires separate execution | Atomic with vote | Delayed by challenge period |
Infrastructure Dependency | Centralized relayer/IPFS pinning | L1 consensus | Dispute resolution layer |
deep-dive
THE FAILURE MODES
Anatomy of a Broken Stack
Current on-chain voting infrastructure is a collection of brittle, centralized components that break under the load of real governance.
The Snapshot Fallacy: Snapshot's off-chain signing creates a trust bottleneck. The system delegates all security and liveness to a single, centralized IPFS pinning service, making votes censorable and vulnerable to a single point of failure.
Execution is an Afterthought: Passing a proposal on Snapshot creates a separate, manual execution risk. Projects like Uniswap and Compound rely on multi-sig signers to manually execute passed votes, reintroducing human latency and centralization.
On-Chain Voting is Prohibitively Expensive: Direct voting on L1 Ethereum costs hundreds of dollars per vote, excluding retail participants. Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism reduce cost but fragment governance liquidity and tooling.
Evidence: The 2022 $120M Optimism governance incident stemmed from a voter using a delegate contract with corrupted logic, a failure opaque to both Snapshot and the voter, revealing deep stack integration flaws.
protocol-spotlight
WHY CURRENT VOTING INFRASTRUCTURE FAILS AT SCALE
Infrastructure Attempts & Their Shortcomings
Existing solutions for on-chain governance are brittle, expensive, and create centralization vectors that undermine the very systems they aim to secure.
01
The Gas-Cost Death Spiral
On-chain voting forces every voter to pay gas, creating a hard economic cap on participation. This leads to plutocracy and low voter turnout, making protocols vulnerable to low-cost attacks.
- Cost Prohibitive: A single vote on a busy L1 can cost $50+, pricing out small stakeholders.
- Low Turnout: Major DAOs like Uniswap and Compound often see <10% voter participation.
- Attack Surface: A well-funded adversary can outspend a fragmented community to pass malicious proposals.
$50+
Cost Per Vote
<10%
Avg. Turnout
02
The Snapshot Centralization Trap
Off-chain voting platforms like Snapshot solve for cost but introduce critical trust assumptions and execution risk, creating a two-step governance process that is often broken.
- Execution Risk: A passed vote is just a signal; a separate, often manual, multi-sig transaction is required to execute, adding days of delay and centralization.
- Data Integrity: Relies on centralized pinning services (e.g., IPFS, Arweave) for proposal data availability.
- Sybil Vulnerability: While using token balances, it lacks the Sybil resistance of a live chain state, relying on snapshot timing which can be gamed.
2-7 Days
Execution Lag
100%
Trust Required
03
Layer 2 Fragmentation & Bridging Latency
Deploying governance tokens on L2s (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism) fragments the voter base and introduces complex, slow bridging mechanics for cross-chain voting, destroying governance cohesion.
- Voter Fragmentation: Token holders are siloed across 8+ major L2s, diluting voting power and coordination.
- Bridging Delays: Moving assets to vote can take 7 days (standard bridge challenge period), missing critical proposal windows.
- Oracle Dependence: Cross-chain voting systems (e.g., Nomad, LayerZero) introduce new oracle trust assumptions and latency, creating a meta-governance attack vector.
8+
Siloed Networks
7 Days
Bridge Delay
04
The MEV & Privacy Vacuum
Transparent, on-chain voting exposes voter intent, creating a massive MEV opportunity. Voters can be front-run, have their votes copied (vote-extraction), or be targeted for bribery/retribution.
- Vote Extraction: Sophisticated bots can copy large wallets' votes to swing outcomes, disincentivizing early participation.
- Bribery Markets: Projects like Hidden Hand formalize vote-buying, turning governance into a paid auction.
- No Privacy: Lack of cryptographic privacy (e.g., zk-SNARKs) means voters cannot act without fear of retaliation, skewing outcomes.
100%
Intent Exposure
Auctioned
Governance Power
future-outlook
THE FAILURE OF LEGACY INFRASTRUCTURE
The Path Forward: Intent-Based & Abstraction Layers
Current on-chain voting systems are architecturally incapable of scaling to mass adoption, necessitating a paradigm shift toward intent-based abstraction.
On-chain voting is a UX dead end. Requiring users to sign, pay for, and wait for on-chain transactions for every governance action creates prohibitive friction. This model fails at scale because it treats governance like a payment, not a declaration of preference.
The solution is intent-based delegation. Users should declare what they want (e.g., 'vote Yes on proposal 123'), not how to execute it. Systems like UniswapX and CowSwap pioneered this for trading; governance needs its own intent-centric standard.
Abstraction layers will batch and settle. A user's signed intent gets routed to a specialized solver network (like Across or LayerZero's messaging layer) that aggregates votes, submits a single proof, and settles on-chain. The user pays in any token, never touches gas.
Evidence: The success of ERC-4337 Account Abstraction proves demand for gasless, batched experiences. Voting infrastructure must adopt similar patterns, moving execution complexity off the user's plate and into optimized, competitive solver markets.
takeaways
WHY CURRENT VOTING INFRASTRUCTURE FAILS AT SCALE
TL;DR: The Governance Bottleneck
On-chain governance is collapsing under its own weight, crippled by voter apathy, centralization, and prohibitive costs that make meaningful participation impossible.
01
The Whale Capture Problem
Governance is a plutocracy where token-weighted voting centralizes power. This leads to protocol capture and low voter turnout as retail participation is rendered meaningless.\n- Result: ~1-5% of token holders decide on $10B+ TVL protocols.\n- Consequence: Proposals serve whales, not the protocol's long-term health.
1-5%
Voter Turnout
$10B+
TVL at Risk
02
The Gas Fee Wall
Direct on-chain voting on Ethereum Mainnet is economically unviable. A single vote can cost $50-$200+, making participation a luxury good.\n- Result: Governance is restricted to the wealthy or delegated to centralized entities.\n- Workaround: Snapshot off-chain voting creates a trust-to-execute gap, requiring a multisig to implement results.
$50-$200+
Cost Per Vote
100%
Off-Chain Reliance
03
The Abstraction Layer (Uniswap, Aave, Compound)
Major DAOs have abstracted voting to off-chain platforms like Snapshot, but this creates a critical security gap. Votes are signals, not commands, requiring a trusted multisig for execution.\n- Result: Governance latency of days or weeks between proposal and execution.\n- Risk: The multisig becomes a centralized point of failure and censorship.
Days-Weeks
Execution Latency
5-9
Multisig Signers
04
The Information Asymmetry Trap
Voters lack the time and expertise to evaluate complex technical proposals. This leads to low-information voting, blind delegation, or complete apathy.\n- Result: Delegates with brand recognition gain outsized influence without accountability.\n- Systemic Risk: Critical upgrades or treasury allocations are decided by a tiny, potentially misinformed cohort.
<1 hr
Avg. Voter Research
10-20
Key Delegates
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