---
title: "Karma"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/analytics/karma"
updated: 2026-09-04
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Karma

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Category** | Delegate reputation · governance analytics · accountability — now a side product; the company’s front door sells grant and philanthropic funding software |
| **Launched** | 2022 (first Optimism delegate dashboard, June 2022) |
| **What it does** | Scores and surfaces [delegate](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/voting-and-delegation) activity — a per-DAO reputation dashboard aggregating on-chain votes, [Snapshot](https://snapshot.org/) votes and forum contributions into one comparable delegate feed |
| **Used by** | [Optimism](/wiki/daos/networks/optimism-collective), [Arbitrum](/wiki/daos/networks/arbitrum-dao), [ENS](/wiki/daos/infrastructure/ens-dao), [Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao), Idle and others; the DAO site’s own current claim is “+25 leading players” ([gov.karmahq.xyz](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/), read 4 September 2026) |
| **Open source** | Score weights and calculation logic are published per DAO ([github.com/show-karma](https://github.com/show-karma)) |
| **Site** | [gov.karmahq.xyz](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/) (the DAO product) · [how it works](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/how-it-works) · [karmahq.org](https://www.karmahq.org/) (the company; `www.karmahq.xyz` now redirects here) |
| **Related** | [DeepDAO](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/analytics/deepdao) · [Tally](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/voting/tally) · [Delegation](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/voting-and-delegation) |

**Karma** is the accountability layer for [delegated](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/voting-and-delegation) 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](https://snapshot.org/) (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](https://snapshot.org/), 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](/wiki/daos/infrastructure/ens-dao) 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](https://github.com/show-karma) so the number is auditable rather than a black box.

## Why delegate accountability matters

Delegation is what makes [token-weighted voting](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/voting-and-delegation) is one of the most common ways a DAO decays (see [how DAOs fail](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/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](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/voting/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](https://docs.gap.karmahq.xyz/), tracking whether funded programs deliver against their milestones — the line of work that has since become the company’s main product.

## Where the company went

Karma the tool and Karma the company have come apart, and the split is recent enough that most write-ups of the delegate dashboards have not caught it. Read on **4 September 2026**, `www.karmahq.xyz` no longer serves a site: it answers with a redirect to [www.karmahq.org](https://www.karmahq.org/), whose front door describes the product as [“agentic funding software for foundations and donor advisors”](https://www.karmahq.org/) — run, in its own framing, from ChatGPT or Claude. Neither “DAO” nor “delegate” appears anywhere in that home page; the customers it names are UNICEF, the San Francisco Foundation, Regen Coordination and the Trinity Center alongside the crypto grant programs. The word survives one level down, on a [page index](https://www.karmahq.org/llms.txt) whose Communities entry offers to “explore DAOs, protocols, and organizations running funding programs on Karma” — DAOs as _grant-makers_, not as electorates. The governance product is reachable from the company site only as a _Governance_ link in the footer.

The dashboards themselves are still up and still maintained, which is the part a DAO relying on them needs to know. [gov.karmahq.xyz](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/) serves the same delegate and contributor toolkit it always did, and on GitHub the [Discourse plugin](https://github.com/show-karma/discourse-plugin) that renders governance stats inside ENS’s forum was pushed on 4 September 2026. But the cadence has tilted: the [whitelabel delegate app](https://github.com/show-karma/dao-delegates-app) was last pushed on 7 August 2026, against near-daily commits on the grant-accountability repositories. The Grantee Accountability Protocol’s own domain, `gap.karmahq.xyz`, redirects into karmahq.org too; only [the documentation](https://docs.gap.karmahq.xyz/) still uses the name.

Nothing here is a failure, and the delegate scores have not gone anywhere. It is worth recording precisely because of what it says about the layer: measuring whether delegates show up is a service somebody else owns and can reprice, rebrand or retire, and the accountability signal a DAO leans on is only as durable as its vendor’s interest in the market. Karma found a larger one.

## 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](/wiki/foundations/what-is-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](/wiki/governance/voting) and the [exit right](/blog/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](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/how-it-works) and [governance dashboards](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/).
- Optimism Collective governance forum, [“Karma — Dashboard showing delegate reputation”](https://gov.optimism.io/t/karma-dashboard-showing-delegate-reputation/2525) (June 2022, introducing the first Karma dashboard).
- Arbitrum DAO forum, [“Tally integrates Karma’s delegate score and contributor metrics”](https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/tally-integrates-karmas-delegate-score-and-contributor-metrics/24911).
- Karma, [Analytics Suite for Optimism](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/case-study/optimism) and [for ENS](https://gov.karmahq.xyz/case-study/ens) (per-DAO weightings).
- Karma, [company home](https://www.karmahq.org/) and [llms.txt](https://www.karmahq.org/llms.txt) (the 2026 positioning) · [Grantee Accountability Protocol documentation](https://docs.gap.karmahq.xyz/) · [github.com/show-karma](https://github.com/show-karma) (repository push dates).