The Coordination Cost of Public Bribery in Governance Attacks

Platforms like Paladin and Hidden Hand create liquid markets for governance votes, slashing the coordination cost for attackers from months of backroom deals to a single transaction.\n- Lowers Attack Barrier: Any actor with capital can rent voting power from passive token holders.\n- Amplifies Impact: A single bribe can sway votes across $1B+ TVL protocols like Aave or Compound.

Protocols like Frax Finance and Olympus DAO implement vote-locking (ve-token models) to create a direct cost for malicious actors.\n- Increases Attack Cost: Attackers must acquire and lock tokens for months or years, tying up capital.\n- Aligns Incentives: Long-term holders are less likely to sell their voting rights for a short-term bribe.

Delegated voting systems (e.g., Uniswap, Compound) centralize power with a few large delegates, creating a single point of failure for bribery.\n- High Leverage: Corrupting one delegate with millions of delegated tokens is more efficient than bribing thousands of small holders.\n- Hidden Loyalties: Delegates can secretly accept bribes, betraying their delegators' assumed interests.

Frameworks like Aragon OSx and DAOstack enable immutable, on-chain voting strategies that execute based on pre-defined logic, not mutable human intent.\n- Removes Human Vector: Votes are cast automatically by smart contracts following public rules.\n- Enables Counter-Bribes: Communities can program treasury funds to automatically counter malicious proposals, as seen in Fantom's ecosystem.

Bribes can be paid via MEV relays (e.g., Flashbots SUAVE) to validators for reordering or censoring governance transactions, moving the attack to the consensus layer.\n- Protocol-Agnostic: Attacks any DAO, regardless of its internal governance safeguards.\n- Extremely Fast: Attack execution occurs at the block production level (~12 sec).

Ethereum's roadmap includes PBS to separate block building from proposing, making validator-level bribery orders of magnitude more complex and expensive.\n- Dilutes Influence: Requires bribing a decentralized set of builders, not a single proposer.\n- Increases Transparency: All builder bids are public in the crList, exposing suspicious activity.

Attackers can coordinate cheaply off-chain (e.g., Telegram, Discord) to amass voting power, while defenders (delegates, token holders) face massive information and action latency.\n- Cost to Attack: Primarily the price of acquiring voting tokens, often via flash loans or derivatives.\n- Cost to Defend: Requires broad, rapid community mobilization against a moving target, often failing.

Legitimate governance requires expensive, transparent processes (forum posts, Snapshot votes, multisig execution), making reactive defense nearly impossible.\n- Time Lag: From proposal to execution can take days to weeks, while an attack executes in blocks.\n- Voter Apathy: Most token holders are passive, requiring expensive bribes or education to mobilize, a classic collective action problem.

The only reliable defense is to hardcode reaction time into the protocol, shifting coordination cost back onto attackers.\n- Enforced Delay: Mandate a 48-72 hour timelock between vote conclusion and execution, creating a defense window.\n- Emergency Veto: Implement a secure multisig or optimistic challenge period (like Arbitrum's Security Council) capable of freezing malicious proposals.

Make the cost of a successful attack existential by ensuring the community can fork away, leaving attackers with worthless governance tokens.\n- Social Consensus: A successful fork requires pre-established legitimacy and clear protocol ownership.\n- Limitation: Only works for protocols with strong brand value and composable, forkable code. Less effective for novel or complex systems.

Increasing token supply or staking requirements does not solve the coordination problem; it merely raises the attack's dollar cost, not its logistical difficulty.\n- Attackers use leverage (flash loans, derivatives) to bypass capital requirements.\n- Defenders still face the same collective action hurdle, just with more expensive tokens.

Architect governance assuming attackers will always coordinate more efficiently. Design for defense-inertia.\n- Automate Responses: Use circuit-breakers that trigger on anomalous voting patterns.\n- Minimize On-Chain Power: Keep critical upgrades (e.g., treasury, core logic) behind multi-sig or slow timelocks, using on-chain votes for parameter tweaks only.