Why Quadratic Voting Is Not a Silver Bullet

QV's core premise—one-person-one-vote via identity cost—is shattered by pseudonymity. Attackers can cheaply create Sybil identities to manipulate outcomes, as seen in early Gitcoin Grants rounds. The cost of attack scales with the square root of capital, not linearly.

• Key Flaw: Identity is a soft, not cryptographic, constraint.
• Real Consequence: Whale dominance simply shifts from direct voting to identity farming.

QV intentionally makes large votes prohibitively expensive, aiming to elevate small holders. In practice, this disincentivizes informed, high-conviction capital from participating. The result is governance by low-stakes, potentially less-aligned voters.

• Key Flaw: Penalizes expertise and skin-in-the-game.
• Real Consequence: Voter apathy among major stakeholders, leading to plutocracy by default.

For QV to even approximate fairness, it requires a robust, costly identity oracle (e.g., BrightID, Proof of Humanity). This adds layers of centralization, friction, and gas costs, killing mainstream adoption. The cure is often worse than the disease.

• Key Flaw: Requires a perfect external system that doesn't exist.
• Real Consequence: ~$10+ gas overhead and weeks-long verification processes per user.

Even QV's chief proponent, Vitalik Buterin, now advocates for pairwise-bounded quadratic voting or liberal radicalism (CLR) for public goods funding. The frontier has moved to mechanisms that are Sybil-resistant by design, like proof-of-personhood or soulbound tokens.

• Key Insight: The theory is sound, the on-chain implementation is not.
• Real Direction: Plurality voting with robust identity (SBTs) or futarchy for high-stakes decisions.

The canonical QV case study for public goods funding. It successfully allocates ~$50M+ across 13 rounds by weighting small donors over whales.

• Key Mechanism: One-person-one-vote squared, funded via CLR matching.
• Proven Impact: Diversified funding beyond token-weighted plutocracy.
• Critical Flaw: Sybil resistance relies on Gitcoin Passport, a centralized identity aggregator, creating a trusted oracle problem.

A theoretical pioneer's practical downfall. The RadicalxChange community used QV for internal decisions but abandoned it due to catastrophic Sybil attacks.

• The Problem: No cost to create identities made $1 = n² votes trivial to game.
• The Result: Voting power became a function of capital for identity creation, not genuine support.
• The Lesson: QV without cryptographically costly sybil resistance (e.g., proof-of-personhood, high-stake bonding) is mathematically insecure.

Optimism's RetroPGF uses QV to reward public goods contributors. While innovative, it highlights the UX and comprehension barrier.

• The Problem: Voters struggle with the quadratic cost function, leading to suboptimal vote allocation and low participation.
• The Data: Rounds 2 & 3 saw significant voter concentration on a few projects, undermining QV's ideal distribution.
• The Reality: Perfect mechanism design fails if the electorate cannot execute the strategy, creating an expertise-based plutocracy.

QV assumes independent voters. In practice, collusion (e.g., vote trading, bribery) is a dominant strategy, breaking the mechanism's core assumptions.

• The Attack: Two voters can pool funds to buy votes for a shared project, achieving linear cost scaling instead of quadratic.
• Real-World Evidence: Research from Vitalik Buterin and others shows collusion-resistant QV requires complex, often impractical, cryptographic schemes (e.g., MACI).
• The Takeaway: For high-stakes on-chain votes, naive QV is a security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.

QV's core premise—that cost scales quadratically with influence—is shattered by cheap, automated identity creation. Without a robust, costly identity layer (like Proof-of-Humanity), governance is a race to the bottom.

• Cost of Attack: Sybil-ing a $1M vote can cost < $10k with today's tools.
• Real-World Failure: Early Gitcoin Grants rounds required complex, centralized fraud detection to mitigate this.

QV doesn't eliminate whale dominance; it just changes its form. A coordinated group of whales can still dominate by splitting funds across identities, while apathy ensures >90% of token holders never vote.

• Participation Reality: Even in mature DAOs like Uniswap, voter turnout rarely exceeds 10%.
• Outcome: Decisions reflect a tiny, potentially collusive subset, not the "wisdom of the crowd."

The math behind QV is not intuitive. This creates a knowledge gap where a small cadre of technocrats (or the team behind the snapshot strategy) become de facto rulers by framing choices and designing the voting mechanism itself.

• Power Shift: Influence moves from explicit capital to implicit social capital and technical know-how.
• Builder Takeaway: You're not building a pure democracy; you're building a meritocratic oligarchy with extra steps.

For on-chain QV, capital must be locked (e.g., in a bonding curve). This creates a massive, non-productive liquidity sink and exposes voters to volatility and opportunity cost, further depressing participation.

• Capital Lockup: Voting on a $1M proposal may require $10M+ in idle, locked capital.
• Result: Only the most dedicated (or wealthy) can afford to participate meaningfully, contradicting QV's egalitarian goals.