Karma is the accountability layer for delegated governance. In a large token-weighted DAO most holders never vote directly; they delegate their voting power to a smaller set of active delegates, and the obvious question — are those delegates actually showing up? — has no answer in the raw on-chain record. Karma builds per-DAO dashboards that answer it: it reads each delegate's on-chain voting, Snapshot (off-chain) voting and forum participation, folds them into a single reputation score, and publishes a public delegate feed so token holders can see who is engaged before handing over their votes.

What it measures

For each delegate Karma tracks the metrics that reveal whether delegated power is being used: on-chain voting participation (share of executable proposals voted on), off-chain voting participation on Snapshot, and forum activity on Discourse — proposals authored, comments, and the health of that participation. These roll up into a per-DAO reputation score and an auto-generated delegate profile that reads like a governance resume, spanning every DAO the same wallet is active in. The weightings are set with each DAO rather than fixed: in the ENS configuration, for example, authoring a forum proposal carries far more weight than casting an off-chain vote, and the weights and scoring logic are open source so the number is auditable rather than a black box.

Why delegate accountability matters

Delegation is what makes token-weighted voting workable at scale — but it also creates a principal-agent gap. A holder who delegates and stops paying attention has no cheap way to notice that their delegate went quiet, switched interests, or started rubber-stamping. Low, concentrated participation is one of the most common ways a DAO decays (see how DAOs fail), and it is invisible until someone measures it. Karma makes the measurement standing infrastructure: DAOs surface it to re-delegate away from absent delegates, and platforms consume it directly — Tally integrates Karma's delegate score alongside a delegate's own voting percentages so the accountability signal sits next to the voting interface itself.

Limits of a reputation score

A participation score measures activity, not judgement. A delegate can vote on everything and vote badly, or author many forum posts that add little; turning “showed up” into a headline number risks rewarding volume over quality, and any single weighting encodes a contestable view of what good governance looks like. Karma’s answer is transparency rather than a claim of objectivity — the weights are published and set per DAO — but the score is a prompt to look, not a verdict. It tells a holder which delegates to scrutinise; it cannot tell them which delegate is right. Karma has also extended the same accountability pattern beyond delegates into grant reporting via its Grantee Accountability Protocol, tracking whether funded programs deliver against their milestones.

How Caper approaches this

Karma exists because influence and participation are separated: voting power is delegated to agents, and a whole tooling layer is needed to check whether those agents stay active. A caper narrows that gap by construction. Voting weight is not a static balance you hand to a delegate — it is your holdings multiplied by the votes you have actually accumulated over the pool, so sustained participation is priced into the weight rather than measured after the fact by an external scorecard. A holder who stops engaging simply carries less weight; there is no idle-delegate class to police. And a holder who is persistently outvoted is not stuck monitoring representatives to protect their stake — the vote and the exit right are the same right, so disengagement resolves by leaving with a fair share rather than by a reputation dashboard flagging a no-show. Karma is the right tool for the delegated model; a caper aims not to need one.

References

• Karma, How reputation scoring works and governance dashboards.
• Optimism Collective governance forum, “Karma — Dashboard showing delegate reputation” (June 2022, introducing the first Karma dashboard).
• Arbitrum DAO forum, “Tally integrates Karma’s delegate score and contributor metrics”.
• Karma, Analytics Suite for Optimism and for ENS (per-DAO weightings).