How communities turn preferences into on-chain decisions.
Conviction VotingSupport that grows the longer you back a proposal.Delegate accountability and dormant delegatesDelegation is the mechanism that makes large token electorates workable: a holder who will never read a proposal assigns their weight to someone who will.FutarchyFutarchy is a governance system in which a community votes on what to maximize and prediction markets decide which proposal is most likely to achieve it.Governance timelocksA governance timelock is an enforced waiting period between the moment a proposal passes and the moment it can actually run.Holographic consensusHolographic consensus is a DAO design, introduced by DAOstack in 2018, that pairs a vote with a prediction market deciding which proposals get attention.Late-vote swingsAn on-chain vote publishes each ballot as it is cast, and closes at a block height fixed when the proposal was created.Majority JudgmentMajority Judgment is a voting method in which each voter grades every candidate on a shared scale, such as Excellent to Poor, and the best median grade wins.Optimistic governance (veto-based approval)Optimistic governance is a DAO voting design in which a proposal passes by default after a waiting period unless enough token holders veto it.Price oracles in governanceA growing family of governance mechanisms does not count votes. Futarchy settles a proposal by comparing two conditional market prices; Caper's optimistic…Private and shielded votingEvery vote cast in a typical DAO is public the moment it lands: the address, the choice, the weight, and the running tally are all readable by anyone, live…Proposal throttles and governance rate limitsMost DAO design attention goes to how votes are counted – quorum and threshold design, token weighting, quadratic schemes.Quadratic voting and fundingWeighting votes and grants by breadth of support, not wealth.Quorum and threshold designA quorum is the minimum amount of voting weight that must participate before a DAO proposal's result is allowed to count.Ranked and alternative ballot methodsAlmost every DAO proposal is a yes/no question, and almost every DAO discussion about voting is about who gets weight – one token one vote, delegation, vote…The DAO proposal lifecycleFrom temperature check to on-chain execution.Token-weighted votingOne-token-one-vote – the default, and its failure modes.Typed vs arbitrary proposal executionEvery DAO framework has to answer one question about its proposals: what is a passed vote allowed to do? There are two families of answer.Vote markets and governance briberyA vote market is a marketplace where anyone can pay the holders of a governance token to vote a particular way.Vote-escrow tokenomics (veTokenomics)Vote-escrow tokenomics, introduced by Curve Finance in 2020, gives members voting weight for locking a protocol token for a set period, more for longer locks.Voting and delegation in DAOsHanding voting power to representatives who show up.Voting power activation and delegation thresholdsVoting power activation is the step between owning a governance token and being able to vote with it.