Why Quadratic Voting Empowers the Mediocre Majority

QV optimizes for broad, shallow participation, systematically devaluing expert opinion. A protocol change with 100 voters spending 1 token each can override 10 experts spending 5 tokens each, despite the experts' aggregate stake being higher.

• Outcome: Mediocre, lowest-common-denominator proposals win.
• Mechanism: Marginal cost to vote is negligible, disincentivizing deep research.

QV's cost curve (cost = votes²) is trivial to game with sybil identities, a flaw acknowledged by its creator, Glen Weyl. Defeating this requires perfect sybil-resistance, an unsolved problem in decentralized systems.

• Result: Whales fragment capital into countless identities to dominate outcomes.
• Irony: The system designed to limit whale power incentivizes its most sophisticated form.

When an individual's vote has negligible impact, it's rational to remain uninformed. QV amplifies this by making additional votes exponentially expensive, so voters make one low-cost, low-information vote and disengage.

• Consequence: Decisions are made by the least informed majority.
• Data Signal: High participation rates mask catastrophically low information density per vote.

QV creates a predictable political economy where lobbying shifts from convincing a few large stakeholders to mobilizing a large number of small, cheap-to-influence identities. This leads to pandering, not progress.

• Dynamic: Proposals become marketing campaigns, not technical debates.
• Examples: See the governance stagnation in early Gitcoin Grants rounds and predictable treasury drain votes.

By divorcing decision weight from actual capital at risk (unlike futarchy or pure token voting), QV destroys the most reliable signal in crypto: skin in the game. The market's ability to price governance outcomes is severed.

• Contrast: In futarchy, you bet real money on a proposal's success metric.
• QV Reality: You spend a trivial, non-speculative fee to express a vague preference.

QV adds significant cognitive and UI complexity (calculating cost, budgeting votes) for marginal theoretical gains. This complexity barrier further filters for sophisticated gamers over genuine stakeholders, exacerbating the mediocrity problem.

• Usability: The average voter cannot intuitively grasp quadratic cost functions.
• Result: System is co-opted by those who can automate and game it.

Early grant rounds saw large donors single-handedly decide rankings, drowning out community sentiment. The solution was implementing Quadratic Funding, a cousin of QV.

• Radical Funding Redistribution: A $10K whale vote is diluted to 100x less influence than 100 voters donating $1 each.
• Proven Impact: Enabled funding for ~2,000+ projects that pure token-weighting would have missed, distributing $50M+ in matched funds.

Early DAOs were paralyzed by whale veto power and malicious proposals. MolochDAO's ragequit + QV-inspired share pricing created a flatter, safer system.

• Quadratic Share Cost: Buying more shares becomes exponentially expensive, preventing single-entity takeover.
• Exit Over Voice: Members can burn shares for a proportional treasury exit, creating a credible threat against bad governance.

Prediction markets for governance (bet on proposal outcomes) assume efficient, well-informed traders. Reality is thin liquidity and manipulation by a few large actors.

• QV as a Corrector: Applying quadratic costs to market positions (like Vitalik's “Qfutarchy”) flattens financial influence, making the market's "vote" more representative of dispersed belief.
• Mitigates MEV: Reduces profitability of manipulating governance outcomes for DeFi protocol extraction.

Launching with >40% of tokens to investors and core team creates an instant governance oligarchy. Retroactive QV or Locked Voting with quadratic weights is a countermeasure.

• Vesting as Voting Power: A token's voting weight could decay linearly while its quadratic cost remains, favoring long-term, engaged holders.
• See: Curve's veToken Model, which uses time-locking to amplify voice, a primitive step towards quadratic weighting.

One-person-one-vote is impossible without a central identity provider. QV's mathematical cost curve is the most viable Sybil-resistance mechanism without KYC.

• Economic Disincentive: Creating 10,000 wallets to vote costs 100x more than the quadratic influence gained.
• **Enables Plurality: Unlike Proof-of-Humanity schemes, it works for non-human entities (smart contracts, DAOs) expressing weighted preference.

Simple token voting only measures wealth distribution. QV measures intensity of preference, capturing how much a community collectively values an outcome.

• Reveals True Consensus: A narrowly-passed 51% vote where opponents feel strongly may be inferior to a 40% vote with intense support (higher quadratic score).
• **Applied in Colorado Democratic Party primaries and corporate budgeting, proving its utility in aggregating nuanced preferences.