Vote Bribery Resistance

This mechanism separates decision-making from direct voting. Instead of voting on proposals, stakeholders bet on the outcome of a prediction market tied to a specific metric (e.g., token price). The market's price signal determines which proposal is expected to maximize value, making direct vote buying irrelevant.

• Example: Stakeholders bet on whether a proposal will cause the protocol's native token to trade above a certain price in 30 days.
• The proposal with the highest predicted positive outcome is automatically executed.

A time-based voting system where voting power (conviction) accumulates the longer a voter's tokens are committed to a proposal. This creates a time cost for bribery, as attackers must lock capital for extended periods, increasing their financial risk and opportunity cost.

• Key Mechanism: Voting power = (Tokens Staked) × (Time Staked).
• Defense: A briber must not only pay for tokens but also bear the cost of locking them, often making attacks prohibitively expensive.

Requires voters to post a bond (collateral) that can be slashed (forfeited) if they vote maliciously or contrary to a verifiable outcome. This aligns voter incentives with the system's health, as bribes must outweigh the risk of losing the bonded stake.

• Implementation: Used in optimistic governance or commit-reveal schemes.
• Deterrent: The slashing risk imposes a direct, punitive cost on voters who accept bribes to vote against the network's interest.

Uses cryptographic primitives like zk-SNARKs to hide individual votes until after the voting period ends. This prevents bribery because the briber cannot verify if the paid voter actually cast the promised vote, breaking the quid-pro-quo exchange.

• Process: Voters generate a zero-knowledge proof that their vote is valid without revealing its content.
• Outcome: Only the final, aggregated tally is revealed, making vote selling unenforceable.

Decouples voting rights from liquid, tradable assets. Voting power is granted based on non-transferable criteria like soulbound tokens (SBTs), identity, or past contributions. Since the voting right cannot be bought or sold, direct bribery of the underlying asset is impossible.

• Examples: Proof-of-Personhood systems, reputation-based governance, and advisory council roles.
• Trade-off: This can reduce liquidity and create new centralization risks around identity issuance.

Designed to make bribery attempts economically futile by destroying or redirecting the bribe. A common design is Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium, where bribes paid in the system's token are automatically burned, increasing the value for all remaining holders and negating the attacker's benefit.

• Principle: The cost of the attack directly strengthens the system it aims to undermine.
• Effect: Raises the economic threshold for a successful attack to near-impossible levels.

A cryptographic technique that prevents voters from proving how they voted until after the vote is finalized, thwarting bribery. Voters first submit a cryptographic commitment (hash) of their vote. After the voting period ends, they reveal their actual vote and the secret used to create the commitment. This makes it impossible for a briber to verify a voter complied with their demand before the vote is tallied.

• Example: Early implementations in DAOs and on-chain governance.
• Limitation: Requires two transactions, increasing gas costs and complexity.

A governance model proposed by Robin Hanson that separates value voting from decision making to resist bribery. Stakeholders vote on a metric to optimize (e.g., "protocol revenue"). For each proposed decision, a prediction market is created to forecast the outcome of that metric. The decision with the best-predicted outcome is automatically implemented.

• Mechanism: Bribing market participants is expensive and uncertain, as it requires moving market prices.
• Implementation: Used experimentally in blockchain projects like Augur and research DAOs.

Protocols assign voting power to tokens that are locked for a defined period, making bribery economically irrational. A briber cannot guarantee the voter's tokens will be unlocked and under their control when the bribe needs to be paid. This aligns voter incentives with the long-term health of the protocol.

• Example: Curve Finance's veToken model (vote-escrowed tokens). Users lock CRV tokens to receive veCRV, which grants voting power that decays linearly over time.
• Effect: Makes buying votes equivalent to buying long-term, illiquid stake in the protocol.

A system designed by Vitalik Butrin and others for collusion-resistant voting. It uses zk-SNARKs and a central coordinator to ensure votes are valid and tallyable, while making it cryptographically impossible for anyone (including the coordinator) to prove how a specific individual voted.

• Key Features: End-to-end verifiability with receipt-freeness. Voters can verify their vote was counted but cannot prove their choice to a third party.
• Use Case: Primarily implemented for quadratic funding rounds (e.g., clr.fund) and decentralized grants to prevent sybil and collusion attacks.

A continuous voting mechanism where voting power accrues over time as tokens are staked on a proposal, making sudden, bribed vote swings difficult. Voters allocate tokens to proposals, and their voting "conviction" grows the longer the tokens remain committed. Changing votes or moving tokens resets the conviction counter.

• Bribery Resistance: A briber must not only pay for the tokens but also for the opportunity cost of the time required to build conviction, making attacks expensive.
• Implementation: Used by Commons Stack and 1Hive Gardens for community funding decisions.

Protocols impose financial penalties (slashing) on voters whose behavior indicates possible collusion or bribery. This is often combined with delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) or futarchy models.

• Mechanism: If a voter (or delegate) votes in a pattern that is statistically anomalous or provably malicious, a portion of their staked assets can be destroyed.
• Rationale: Increases the cost of corruption by putting the voter's own capital at risk. The bribe must exceed the potential slashing penalty plus the voter's ethical discount.

The use of financial incentives and disincentives to secure a decentralized network, making attacks like bribery prohibitively expensive. This is the foundational principle behind vote bribery resistance, where the cost to corrupt the system must exceed the potential profit.

• Stake Slashing: Penalizes malicious voting by destroying a validator's staked assets.
• Opportunity Cost: Capital used for bribery could be staked honestly for rewards, creating a natural deterrent.

A governance model where decisions are made based on prediction market outcomes rather than direct voting. Proposed by economist Robin Hanson, it aims to resist bribery by making the attack target (the vote) a bet on a future outcome.

• Market-Based Truth: The "vote" is the market price, which is expensive to manipulate at scale.
• Skin in the Game: Participants profit by accurately predicting the success of a proposal, aligning incentives with the network's health.

A broader security property that prevents coordinated subversion by a group of validators or voters. Vote bribery is a form of explicit collusion. Resistance mechanisms include:

• Anti-Sybil Design: Preventing a single entity from creating many fake identities (sybils) to vote.
• Decentralized Identity: Using proof-of-personhood or other systems to ensure one-human-one-vote models.
• Secret Ballots (e.g., MACI): Hiding individual votes until after the tally to prevent targeted payouts.

A voting mechanism where the cost of casting additional votes for a single option increases quadratically. This mathematically limits the influence any single voter can buy, creating inherent bribery resistance.

• Example: Buying 1 vote costs $1, but buying 10 votes costs $100 (10²).
• Dilutes Capital Efficiency: A briber's funds become drastically less effective as they try to buy more influence, making large-scale attacks economically irrational.

A system where voting power increases the longer tokens are locked in support of a proposal. This introduces a high time-cost for bribery, as bribed tokens must be locked and cannot be quickly resold.

• Time-Locked Capital: Attackers cannot easily liquidate bribed votes, increasing their risk.
• Conviction Accumulation: Honest, long-term stakeholders naturally gain more influence over time, countering short-term bribery campaigns.

A cryptographic framework for collusion-resistant voting where votes are encrypted and tallied by a central administrator who cannot decrypt individual votes. This prevents a briber from verifying if a paid voter actually complied.

• Key Mechanism: Uses zk-SNARKs to prove the tally is correct without revealing the vote-to-voter link.
• Breaks Quid Pro Quo: Since voters can lie about their vote, bribers cannot enforce payment, destroying the bribery market.