Why Gasless Voting Is a Double-Edged Sword for Security

Relayers become centralized gatekeepers for governance. A malicious or compliant relayer can selectively exclude transactions, silently censoring votes.

• Key Risk: A single entity controlling a major relayer (e.g., Flashbots SUAVE) could blacklist proposals.
• Mitigation: Requires a robust, permissionless network of relayers, akin to Ethereum's PBS ideals.

Gasless models rely on perpetual subsidies from treasuries or meta-transaction services like Biconomy or Gelato. This creates a hidden, uncapped cost center.

• Key Risk: Protocols face runaway OPEX if voter participation scales unexpectedly.
• Data Point: Major DAOs can incur $1M+ monthly in relay costs during heated governance seasons.

Removing the gas cost barrier makes vote buying and Sybil attack coordination trivially cheap. Adversaries only pay for the vote signature, not the gas.

• Key Risk: Enables low-cost governance attacks where the cost to sway a vote plummets.
• Example: An attacker could fund thousands of Gitcoin Passport-verified identities for pennies per vote.

Force relayers to post substantial economic bonds (e.g., via EigenLayer or Cosmos SDK modules) that can be slashed for censorship or malfeasance.

• Key Benefit: Aligns relayer incentives with protocol liveness and censorship resistance.
• Trade-off: Increases relayer operational cost, potentially reducing network size and increasing fees.

Implement a two-tier system where users pay a minimal priority fee, while the protocol subsidizes the base fee. This preserves a spam-resistance signal.

• Key Benefit: Maintains a cryptoeconomic cost for participation, deterring pure Sybil attacks.
• Implementation: Similar to EIP-4844 blob fee market, separating base and priority components.

Leverage zero-knowledge proofs (e.g., zkSNARKs via RISC Zero) to allow users to prove unique personhood or stake ownership without revealing identity, paid for by the relayer.

• Key Benefit: Decouples Sybil resistance from gas payment, moving it to an attestation layer like Worldcoin or BrightID.
• Complexity: Introduces reliance on external, often centralized, identity oracles.

Gasless voting eliminates the primary economic cost of creating governance influence. Attackers can spin up thousands of pseudo-anonymous wallets at near-zero cost to execute a 51% attack on a proposal. This fundamentally breaks the 1-token-1-vote assumption, turning governance into a contest of wallet generation speed.

Users rely on a trusted relayer network (e.g., Gelato, Biconomy) to pay gas and submit votes. This creates a single point of censorship and failure. A malicious or compromised relayer can:

• Censor votes for or against specific proposals.
• Front-run or manipulate vote ordering.
• Go offline, halting governance during critical periods.

Gasless vote transactions are public in the mempool before being bundled. This creates a new MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) opportunity. Searchers can analyze voting patterns and:

• Front-run governance token buys/sells based on likely outcomes.
• Sandwich attack liquidity around proposal execution.
• Bribe voters in real-time to change votes, corrupting the process.

Mitigation requires reintroducing a non-monetary but costly barrier to entry. Effective models include:

• Proof-of-Personhood (World ID, BrightID) to limit one vote per human.
• Proof-of-Stake with Lockup requiring time-locked capital to vote.
• Futarchy & Prediction Markets to shift focus to skin-in-the-game forecasting rather than raw vote count.

Gasless voting removes the primary economic cost of creating governance power, making Sybil attacks trivial. This forces a dangerous reliance on centralized identity providers like Gitcoin Passport or Worldcoin.

• Key Risk: Delegates with 1M+ votes can be manufactured for pennies.
• Key Mitigation: Must layer proof-of-personhood with stake-weighted checks.

Protocols like Aave and Compound that use tokenized votes (e.g., aTokens, cTokens) become vulnerable. Attackers can borrow vast voting power without economic skin in the game, execute a malicious proposal, and exit.

• Key Vector: Flash loan $100M+ in governance tokens, vote, repay.
• Key Defense: Implement vote latency or bonding periods to disincentivize short-term attacks.

Gasless transactions require a relayer network (e.g., Gelato, Biconomy). This creates a single point of failure. A malicious or coerced relayer can censor votes or front-run governance transactions.

• Key Dependency: Governance security inherits the ~5 major relayers' integrity.
• Key Solution: Design for relayer diversity and permissionless relay fallbacks.

Zero-cost voting increases low-quality participation. Users delegate to the default option or influencers without diligence, creating voting cartels. This centralizes power with a few delegates like "stakefish" or "Figment".

• Key Metric: >60% of votes often follow top 3 delegates.
• Key Design: Implement delegate incentives and vote delegation expiry.