The Future of Quadratic Voting: Integrating Non-Financial Signals

Current solutions like proof-of-humanity or token-gating create a binary in/out system, losing granular reputation data. This fails to capture the quality of contributions or domain-specific expertise, leading to low-signal governance.

• Binary Pass/Fail loses nuance
• One-Person-One-Vote is not scalable for global protocols
• Token-Weighted Voting remains dominant by default

Protocols like Gitcoin Passport and Orange Protocol act as credential aggregators, pulling verifiable data from GitHub, Lens, POAPs, and other sources. They output a composite reputation score that can be used as a non-financial weight in quadratic voting formulas.

• Aggregate signals from multiple Web2/Web3 sources
• Issue verifiable, privacy-preserving attestations
• Enable quadratic voting based on sqrt(reputation) not sqrt(capital)

EigenLayer's restaking model creates a cryptoeconomic security layer. Attesters (like credential oracles) can be slashed for misbehavior, creating a market for trusted reputation signals. This aligns the cost of forging credentials with their potential governance payoff.

• Slashing disincentivizes bad data
• Monetization for high-fidelity attestation services
• Bootstrap trust without centralized issuers

Optimism's RetroPGF rounds are a live experiment in quadratic funding using non-token signals. Contributors receive "Contributor Status" based on peer reviews and project impact, which feeds into future voting weight. This creates a virtuous cycle of contribution and governance.

• Retroactive funding aligns incentives
• Peer review creates a social proof layer
• Pilot for on-chain reputation-based governance

Revealing granular credentials for voting creates privacy leaks and targeting risks. ZK-proofs (like those used by Sismo and Polygon ID) allow a user to prove they hold a credential meeting a threshold (e.g., ">100 GitHub commits") without revealing which one or their full history.

• Selective Disclosure protects user data
• Minimal on-chain footprint for verification
• Enables compliant (e.g., KYC) voting without doxxing

The final stack is a user-owned, composable reputation graph. A credential earned in Optimism's ecosystem (like a governance badge) could be used to weight votes in Arbitrum or Uniswap, creating network effects for positive behavior. This requires standardized schemas (W3C VC) and shared security layers.

• Portable identity across L2s & apps
• Composable reputation as a new primitive
• Break siloed governance monopolies

QV's core defense against Sybil attacks is financial cost. Replacing it with social or identity signals creates a new attack surface.\n- Proof-of-Personhood systems like Worldcoin or BrightID become single points of failure.\n- Attackers can farm or forge non-financial credentials at marginal cost, breaking the cost-to-influence ratio.\n- This shifts the security model from cryptoeconomic to social, which is harder to automate and secure.

Non-financial signals (reputation, expertise, attendance) require trusted oracles. These become high-value manipulation targets.\n- Oracle networks like Chainlink must now attest to subjective, off-chain data, increasing complexity and risk.\n- Adversaries can corrupt data sources or bribe oracle nodes to inflate their voting power.\n- This creates a meta-game where controlling the signal oracle is more profitable than participating in governance.

Deciding which non-financial signals matter reintroduces central planners. This undermines QV's permissionless ethos.\n- Protocols like Gitcoin Grants rely on a central team to define "legitimate" contributor status.\n- Curation markets become political battlegrounds, leading to regulatory capture and rent-seeking.\n- The system's legitimacy hinges on a small group's ability to resist corruption and bias.

Financial QV ties power to liquid capital, which is easily audited and sybil-resistant. Non-financial signals are illiquid and opaque.\n- Systems like Optimism's Citizen House must choose between easy-to-verify but shallow signals (NFTs) and meaningful but hard-to-verify ones (expertise).\n- Illegitimate signals cannot be easily slashed or penalized post-discovery.\n- This creates permanent, unremovable bad actors within the governance system.

Multi-signal QV systems become incomprehensible to average participants, reverting governance to a technocratic elite.\n- Voters must now understand the weighting of financial stake, reputation scores, and contribution history.\n- This creates information asymmetry where sophisticated players (VCs, whales) can game the opaque system.\n- The result is lower voter turnout and effective control by a small, informed minority.

Non-financial signals can transform a governance mechanism into a regulated security or financial service.\n- If "reputation" or "contribution" scores are tradable, they may be classified as investment contracts under the Howey Test.\n- Systems that curate or score users could be deemed money transmitters or data brokers.\n- This invites global regulatory scrutiny that pure token-based QV might avoid.

Pure financial QV is vulnerable to sybil attacks and excludes key stakeholders without capital. It conflates wealth with conviction, skewing governance toward whales.

• Attack Vector: Trivial to split funds across wallets to game the quadratic cost curve.
• Exclusionary: Developers, active users, and domain experts are disenfranchised.
• Signal Noise: A whale's casual vote can drown out a community's passionate consensus.

Integrate non-financial signals like Gitcoin Passport, BrightID, or Proof-of-Humanity to establish unique identity. This creates a sybil-resistant base layer for voting power allocation.

• Sybil Resistance: A verified human/entity gets one base voting power unit, independent of wealth.
• Rich Identity: Combine financial stake with proof-of-contribution, tenure, or expertise.
• Protocols: Worldcoin (orb verification), ENS (longevity), Layer3 (task completion).

Build QV systems that consume verifiable credentials from external reputation oracles. Decouple identity/credit scoring from the voting mechanism itself.

• Modularity: Use EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) for on-chain credentials. Pull data from SourceCred, Coordinape, or custom metrics.
• Flexible Weighting: Algorithmically combine financial stake with reputation scores for final voting power.
• Composability: Enables cross-DAO reputation, preventing re-sybilizing for each new protocol.

Apply multi-signal QV to public goods funding via Hybrid Quadratic Funding. Match funds based on a blend of financial contributions and community trust scores.

• Better Allocation: Reduces whale dominance and grant farming seen in pure QF rounds.
• Entities: Gitcoin Grants is experimenting with this; clr.fund can integrate.
• Outcome: Funds flow to projects with broad, authentic support, not just marketing budgets.

The new attack surface shifts from on-chain capital to oracle data integrity. Who defines and attests to "reputation"? This creates centralization and bias risks.

• Oracle Risk: A malicious or compromised attestor (e.g., Worldcoin) could corrupt the entire governance system.
• Subjectivity: Designing reputation metrics introduces political bias into the protocol's core.
• Mitigation: Use decentralized oracle networks (Chainlink) and multi-source attestation aggregation.

Assume all external signals are corruptible. Design QV systems with defense-in-depth: slashing for false attestations, progressive decentralization roadmaps, and fallback mechanisms.

• First Principle: Non-financial signals must be as cryptographically verifiable as a token transfer.
• Action Item: Start with a hybrid model where financial QV dominates, then gradually increase weight of verified reputation.
• Goal: Achieve collusion-resistant governance, not just sybil-resistant voting.