Tally

Tally is a comprehensive governance portal and analytics platform designed to facilitate participation in decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance. It aggregates governance data from major protocols, providing users with a unified interface to discover active proposals, delegate voting power, and cast votes across multiple DAOs. The platform is built to be chain-agnostic, initially focusing on Ethereum-based DAOs that use standards like Governor Bravo. By centralizing governance activity, Tally aims to lower the barrier to entry for token holders and improve the transparency and efficiency of on-chain decision-making.

The platform's core functionality revolves around its delegate dashboard and proposal explorer. Users can connect their wallet to see their voting power, track delegated votes, and receive notifications for upcoming proposals. For delegates—individuals or entities who represent other token holders—Tally offers profile pages showcasing their voting history, delegation stats, and governance statements. This creates a transparent reputation system, allowing token holders to make informed decisions when delegating their governance tokens. The proposal explorer provides detailed breakdowns of each vote, including voter turnout, quorum status, and the voting history of key delegates.

From a technical perspective, Tally does not host the governance contracts itself but acts as a front-end interface and data layer. It reads on-chain data from DAO smart contracts, indexes it, and presents it in a user-friendly format. The platform also provides critical governance analytics, such as voter participation rates, proposal execution timelines, and treasury management metrics. These tools are essential for DAO members to assess the health and activity of their organization and for researchers to study governance trends across the ecosystem.

Tally's development is closely tied to the broader OpenZeppelin ecosystem, as it supports the widely adopted Governor contract standard. This standardizes the interaction, allowing Tally to provide consistent features like vote casting, proposal creation, and timelock management across different DAOs. The platform also emphasizes security, ensuring that votes are cast directly on-chain through verified contract interactions, with no custodianship of user funds or voting power.

The platform addresses key challenges in DAO governance, including voter apathy and information asymmetry. By making it easier to delegate votes to knowledgeable community members and by surfacing critical proposal information, Tally encourages greater participation. It serves as a public good for the governance ecosystem, providing free access to its core features while exploring sustainable models through premium analytics and services for professional DAO operators and institutions.

At its core, Tally operates as a governance dashboard and delegation platform for DAOs built on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains. It aggregates proposal data, voting activity, and delegate information into a unified interface, allowing token holders to track governance, delegate their voting power, and participate in proposals. The platform's architecture is non-custodial, meaning it does not hold user funds or voting tokens, instead interacting directly with the smart contracts of each supported protocol, such as Uniswap, Compound, or Gitcoin.

The platform's functionality is built around several key components: the Tally Governance Portal for proposal creation and voting, a Delegate Directory for discovering and following influential community members, and Real-time Voting Data for tracking live proposals and historical outcomes. For delegates, Tally provides profile pages to publish statements and voting history, creating a transparent record of their governance participation. This system enables a representative democracy model where less active token holders can delegate their voting power to trusted experts.

From a technical perspective, Tally indexes on-chain governance events from protocol smart contracts, presenting them in a human-readable format. It supports various governance standards, including Governor Bravo and its derivatives. The platform also offers gasless voting through integrations with services like Snapshot for off-chain signaling and tools for managing multi-chain governance where a DAO's tokens and voting may span multiple networks. This infrastructure reduces the technical barriers to participation, aiming to increase voter turnout and governance efficiency.

For DAO operators and developers, Tally provides backend tools and APIs for proposal lifecycle management, including simulation, queuing, and execution. This allows teams to streamline the process from forum discussion to on-chain execution. The platform's data layer also powers analytics and reporting, giving insights into voter behavior, delegation patterns, and proposal success rates, which are critical for auditing and improving a DAO's governance health over time.

Tally is a governance infrastructure platform that provides the user interface, voting dashboard, and proposal management system for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) built on Ethereum. In the context of Decentralized Science (DeSci), it serves as the operational layer where community members—researchers, funders, and stakeholders—can transparently participate in collective decision-making. By aggregating proposals, vote histories, and delegate information, Tally transforms the complex smart contract logic of governance tokens into an accessible dashboard, enabling DeSci DAOs to manage treasury allocations, research grants, and protocol upgrades through on-chain votes.

The platform's core function is to facilitate on-chain governance by interfacing directly with a DAO's smart contracts, such as those built with the OpenZeppelin Governor standard. For a DeSci project, this means that a proposal to fund a specific research initiative is created, debated, and executed entirely on the blockchain via Tally's interface. Key features include delegate voting, where token holders can delegate their voting power to experts or community leaders, and gasless voting, which removes a significant barrier to participation by allowing users to submit votes without paying transaction fees, a critical consideration for engaging a global scientific community.

Tally's role extends beyond a simple interface; it provides real-time governance analytics and transparency. Anyone can audit a DeSci DAO's entire decision-making history, including proposal timelines, voter turnout, and the weight of votes cast. This level of accountability is essential for scientific endeavors requiring trust and verifiability. Furthermore, Tally supports cross-chain governance and is compatible with Layer 2 solutions, allowing DeSci organizations operating on networks like Arbitrum or Optimism to benefit from lower costs and faster transactions while maintaining a unified governance front-end.

By standardizing and simplifying the DAO governance process, Tally reduces the technical overhead for DeSci projects, allowing them to focus on their core scientific missions. It enables a shift from traditional, opaque grant-making institutions to community-owned and operated research entities. Examples include bioDAO platforms using Tally to vote on which drug discovery pathways to fund or data sovereignty projects deciding on data access policies. In this way, Tally acts as the digital town hall for the future of open, collaborative science.