Voting Strategy

The most common strategy where voting power is directly proportional to the quantity of governance tokens held. This aligns influence with economic stake but can lead to plutocracy.

• Example: A user with 100 tokens has 100 votes.
• Use Case: Foundational for protocols like Uniswap and Compound.
• Trade-off: Simple to implement but susceptible to vote buying and whale dominance.

A mechanism designed to reduce whale dominance by making the cost of votes increase quadratically. Voting power is the square root of the tokens committed.

• Mechanism: 1 token = 1 vote, 4 tokens = 2 votes, 100 tokens = 10 votes.
• Goal: To better reflect the intensity of preference among a diverse group.
• Challenge: Requires robust sybil resistance to prevent users from splitting tokens across multiple addresses.

A representative model where token holders can delegate their voting power to a trusted third party or expert. This reduces voter apathy and centralizes expertise.

• Example: Compound and Uniswap allow delegation to individuals or entities.
• Benefit: Enables informed participation without requiring constant engagement from all holders.
• Risk: Can lead to the formation of centralized power blocs or cartels.

A time-based strategy where voting power accumulates the longer a voter supports a proposal. It is designed for continuous funding decisions, not simple yes/no votes.

• Mechanism: Votes are staked on proposals; influence grows over time but is withdrawn immediately if switched.
• Use Case: Pioneered by 1Hive for community grant funding.
• Advantage: Filters for proposals with sustained, organic support and allows for dynamic prioritization.

A strategy where voting power is restricted to a predefined set of addresses, typically a multi-signature wallet controlled by a council or founding team. This is common in early-stage DAOs.

• Mechanism: Proposals execute only after a threshold (e.g., 4-of-7) of keyholders sign the transaction.
• Phase: Often used as a starter governance model before transitioning to token-based voting.
• Characteristic: Efficient but centralized, trading decentralization for execution speed and security.

An advanced strategy that uses a prediction market to pre-filter proposals. Delegates stake tokens to "boost" proposals they believe will pass, fast-tracking them to a main vote.

• Process: Combines futarchy elements with delegated voting.
• Goal: Increases governance scalability by only putting high-confidence proposals to a full token vote.
• Implementation: Used by DAOstack's Alchemy platform to manage proposal throughput.

The most common strategy where voting power is directly proportional to the quantity of a governance token held. This aligns influence with economic stake but can lead to plutocracy.

• Examples: Uniswap (UNI), Compound (COMP), Aave (AAVE).
• Mechanism: 1 token = 1 vote, often with delegation options.
• Limitation: Susceptible to vote buying and whale dominance.

A strategy designed to reduce the power of large token holders by making the cost of votes increase quadratically. It aims to reflect the intensity of preference within a community.

• Concept: Cost = (Number of Votes)². Buying 2 votes costs 4 credits, 3 votes costs 9 credits.
• Implementation: Used by Gitcoin Grants for funding allocation to measure community sentiment.
• Goal: Protects against sybil attacks and whale dominance when combined with identity verification.

A continuous, time-based voting model where voting power accrues the longer a voter supports a proposal. It is designed for ongoing funding decisions in DAO treasuries.

• Mechanism: Users stake tokens on proposals. Voting power increases over time, but is withdrawn immediately if they change their vote.
• Primary Use: Commons funding in DAOs like 1Hive Gardens.
• Advantage: Filters for proposals with sustained, organic community support and allows for dynamic prioritization.

A system where token holders can delegate their voting power to representatives or experts, who then vote on their behalf. This balances direct democracy with representative efficiency.

• Examples: ENS DAO (delegates), Optimism Collective (Citizen House delegates).
• Flexibility: Delegation can be specific to a topic (e.g., treasury management) or broad, and is revocable at any time.
• Benefit: Reduces voter apathy and leverages subject-matter expertise within the community.

A strategy where voting power is concentrated among a small, trusted group of signers (a multisig) or a dedicated security council. This prioritizes security and execution speed over broad decentralization.

• Use Case: Common for protocol upgrades and emergency actions in early-stage projects or layer-2 rollups (e.g., Arbitrum's Security Council).
• Mechanism: Proposals require M-of-N signatures from pre-approved addresses.
• Trade-off: Creates a more centralized point of control but mitigates coordination failure.

Strategies that decouple governance rights from financial stake, using alternative metrics to allocate voting power. This aims to better align influence with contribution or participation.

• Proof-of-Personhood: One-person-one-vote systems using verified unique identities (e.g., Worldcoin's Proof of Personhood).
• Reputation-Based: Voting power based on non-transferable reputation scores earned through contributions (pioneered by Colony).
• NFT-Based: Ownership of a specific non-financial NFT (e.g., a membership pass) grants voting rights.

A core security property that prevents a single entity from creating many fake identities (Sybil attacks) to gain disproportionate voting power. Strategies achieve this by linking voting power to a scarce, costly-to-acquire resource, such as:

• Token ownership (1 token = 1 vote)
• Locked capital (e.g., ve-token models)
• Reputation or soulbound tokens (non-transferable identity)

A major game-theoretic attack where a party offers direct compensation to token holders to vote a specific way, undermining the governance's integrity. Counter-strategies include:

• Secret voting (e.g., zk-SNARKs) to hide votes until they are committed.
• Conviction voting, which requires a time-lock to amplify voting power, making bribery less efficient.
• Minimal anti-collusion infrastructure designed to detect and penalize coordinated bribery.

The risk that a small number of large token holders (whales) can unilaterally dictate governance outcomes, leading to centralization and potential tyranny of the majority. Mitigations include:

• Quadratic voting, where cost scales quadratically with votes cast, favoring broad consensus.
• Delegation to knowledgeable, smaller stakeholders.
• Vote escrow models that reward long-term commitment over sheer capital.

The economic reality where the cost for a token holder to become informed on a proposal outweighs the marginal benefit of their single vote, leading to low participation. Strategies to combat this include:

• Delegative democracy (liquid democracy), where users can delegate votes to experts.
• Bonded voting or skin-in-the-game models that require depositing funds, aligning voter incentives with outcomes.
• Gasless voting via meta-transactions to reduce participation costs.

Security mechanisms that introduce deliberate delays between a vote passing and its execution. This protects the protocol by providing a final safeguard against malicious proposals that have passed due to a short-term attack. Key aspects:

• A timelock period allows the community to react (e.g., exit funds) if a harmful proposal passes.
• Creates a cooling-off period for critical decisions, enabling review and potential veto through social consensus or fork.

In blockchain governance, the ability for a dissenting minority to fork the protocol—creating a new chain with different rules—is the ultimate game-theoretic backstop. This influences strategy by:

• Imposing a cost of exit on the majority; if they act maliciously, they risk losing network value to a fork.
• Making governance less about absolute control and more about maintaining broad legitimacy to avoid chain splits.