Why Quadratic Voting Fails Without a Robust Identity Layer

QV's core mechanism—diminishing voting power per token—is trivial to game. An attacker splits capital across thousands of pseudonymous wallets, restoring linear influence and subverting the system.\n- Real-World Impact: A single entity can control governance of a $100M+ DAO with a fraction of the intended capital.\n- Observed Pattern: Projects like Gitcoin Grants have spent millions on Sybil detection, a reactive tax on a broken base layer.

The fix isn't KYC, but cryptographically assured uniqueness. Protocols like Worldcoin, BrightID, and Proof of Humanity impose a high, non-monetary cost (biometrics, social graph, notarization) to create one identity.\n- Key Benefit: Creates a sybil-resistant graph where one-person-one-vote becomes computationally enforceable.\n- Key Benefit: Enables real democratic weight in QV systems like Radicle or Optimism's Citizen House, moving beyond plutocracy.

Identity is the foundation for non-financialized governance. A verified, persistent identity allows for the accrual of soulbound reputation (SBTs) and participation history. This becomes collateral for influence.\n- Key Benefit: Shifts governance power from transient capital to proven contributors, aligning long-term incentives.\n- Key Benefit: Enables conviction voting and peer prediction markets where reputation is at stake, not just tokens.

Quadratic Voting (QV) mathematically amplifies small-donor impact but is trivial to game. A single entity with 100 wallets has 10,000x the voting power of a legitimate individual. This renders QV-based systems like Gitcoin Grants economically insecure without a robust identity layer.

• Cost of Attack: Near-zero with bot farms.
• Impact: Distorts funding towards easily Sybil'd projects.
• Core Failure: Pure cryptographic identity (EOAs) cannot map to human uniqueness.

A decentralized identity aggregator that scores uniqueness via stitched Web2/Web3 credentials (Google, Twitter, ENS, POAPs). It's a privacy-preserving, incremental trust system.

• Mechanism: Collects stamps, computes a unique humanity score.
• Trade-off: Avoids biometrics but relies on centralized validators (e.g., Google).
• Use Case: Perfect for gradual sybil resistance in community governance.

A hard cryptographic guarantee of unique humanness via iris-scanning orbs. It creates a privacy-preserving proof of personhood (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) decoupled from the biometric data.

• Mechanism: Orb hardware generates a unique IrisHash, user holds a ZK-proof of uniqueness.
• Trade-off: Maximum sybil resistance at the cost of physical hardware and biometric collection.
• Use Case: Foundational layer for global UBI, airdrops, and 1P1V systems.

Passport and Worldcoin represent the fundamental spectrum in decentralized identity: trust in aggregators vs. trust in hardware.

• Passport: Trusts Google, Twitter, etc. not to collude. Lower barrier, softer guarantee.
• Worldcoin: Trusts Orb hardware and its operators. Higher barrier, harder guarantee.
• Result: Passport for progressive decentralization; Worldcoin for binary, global settlement.

A robust identity layer transforms QV from a theoretical ideal into a practical mechanism. It enforces the cost-of-identity to match the value-at-stake in the voting system.

• With Passport: Raises Sybil cost to compromising multiple credentialed accounts.
• With Worldcoin: Raises Sybil cost to physical, global biometric duplication.
• Outcome: Voting power distribution begins to reflect genuine community preference, not capital for bots.

The end-state isn't one winner. Future systems will compose layers like Worldcoin for base uniqueness, Passport for reputation, and on-chain activity graphs from Layer3s. Think EigenLayer for identity AVS.

• Composability: Worldcoin proof as a Passport stamp.
• Specialization: Gitcoin for community DAOs, Worldcoin for macro-economic applications.
• Vision: A modular identity stack where applications choose their sybil-resistance level.

Without a cost to identity creation, rational actors will create infinite wallets to game the system. This transforms governance into a capital-inefficient whale vs. bot war, not a measure of collective preference.

• Cost of Attack: Near-zero; only gas fees.
• Outcome: Voting power scales linearly with capital spent on sybils, defeating the quadratic premise.

Solutions like Worldcoin, BrightID, or Proof of Humanity introduce centralization vectors and privacy trade-offs. They become the single point of failure and censorship for the entire governance system.

• Throughput Bottleneck: Identity verification is O(n) with human time.
• Privacy Leak: Linking all governance actions to a single biometric or social graph.

The quadratic funding formula (∑√contribution) is designed for human consensus. With sybils, a whale can simulate 100 votes for the cost of 10 real votes, distorting allocations and destroying the mechanism's core economic guarantee.

• Result: Funding flows to the best-gamed projects, not the most broadly supported.
• Example: Gitcoin Grants rounds require constant sybil detection overhead.

The real solution is a decentralized, composable identity layer like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) or Verax. Reputation and participation credentials become portable assets, allowing for context-specific sybil resistance without a global oracle.

• Composability: A DAO can weight votes based on verified GitHub commits or prior proposal execution.
• Future: Enables Hypercerts for impact and programmable governance legs.