A voting mechanism is the rule…option is an executable action it authorises someone to, anyone may then open the optimistic window – the market window – whichsince trigger_proposal is permissionless and, from the redeploy of 6 October 2026, free; opening it locks the caper's trailing ti…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…he average down, is the veto. The root $XRD caper is the exception, because it has no curve and so no price of its own. Since the redeploy of 15 September 2026 its window reads a reference basket of other capers' curve prices instead – the component's xrd_basket field, which lists $CAPER alone – and the test inverts: an $XRD proposal passes only if the basket's window average is at or below its baseline. Every curve quotes its token in XRD, so a falling basket is XRD strengthening against capers; for this one caper, moving XRD into capers is the veto and holding XRD is consent (XRD_BASKET and resolve_proposal in contracts/logic/src/lib.rs). One class of winner never reac…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…he average down, is the veto. The root $XRD caper is the exception, because it has no curve and so no price of its own. Since the redeploy of 15 September 2026 its window reads a reference basket of other capers' curve prices instead – the component's xrd_basket field, which lists $CAPER alone – and the test inverts: an $XRD proposal passes only if the basket's window average is at or below its baseline. Every curve quotes its token in XRD, so a falling basket is XRD strengthening against capers; for this one caper, moving XRD into capers is the veto and holding XRD is consent (XRD_BASKET and resolve_proposal in contracts/logic/src/lib.rs). One class of winner never reac…tal alone never carries a vote, though capital is not shut out of earning that record either, sinc. The record comes from ballots alone: each ballot cast carries a flat fee and mints one vote tokens, accrue on trades as well as on ballotsnd trading has minted none since the redeploy of 11 September 2026 (VOTE_FEE and VOTE_MINT in contracts/logic/src/lib.rs). The second half is optimist…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…ed by Curve's veCRV (https://docs.curve.readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.htmlfinance/user/curve-tokens/vecrv) , tie weight to commitment: …oting Escrow (veCRV) (https://docs.curve.readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.htmlfinance/user/curve-tokens/vecrv) . - Wikipedia, Arrow's imp…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…nd the work is in objecting – but whereand the usual contrast – that those systems hand the veto to a guardian – does not survive reading them. Aragon's oOptimistic plugins and UMA's oSnap hand the veto to a named guardian or a bonded challenger, Caper hands it to the marketToken Voting plugin (https://github.com/aragon/optimistic-token-voting-plugin) permissions who may propose, not who may object: the veto sits with token holders and carries when objections reach minVetoRatio of supply. The one that did put objection behind a bond was UMA's oSnap, and UMA retired it on 15 December 2025 (https://docs.uma.xyz/resources/osnap) , since when it executes nothing at all. So the difference Caper turns on is not who holds the veto but what using it costs: a holder veto is a signature, while selling is a trade at a price, which is the futarchy (/wik…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

Topic Collective decision-maki…pation-weighted stake, then a 48-hour marketmarket-window veto – unless the winning opt…n (/wiki/governance/execution)

A voting mechanism is the rule…it authorises someone to open a forty-eight-hour optimistic window,the optimistic window – the market window – which freezelocks the caper's trailing seven-day time-weighted average price as…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

Topic Collective decision-maki…ke, then a 48-hour market veto – unless the winning option is a DEBATE position, which ends the proposal at the tally; see FAQ (/wiki/help/faq) …n (/wiki/governance/execution)

A voting mechanism is the rule…es does not execute anything. IWhere the winning option is an executable action it authorises someone to open a…the average down, is the veto. One class of winner never reaches that second phase. Since 5 September 2026 an option can be typed DEBATE, which carries no action at all: it is ranked with the rest, it can win the count outright, and the proposal ends there. trigger_proposal refuses a DEBATE winner rather than opening a window with nothing to execute at the end of it, and creation asserts such an option carries no execution fields (contracts/logic/src/lib.rs). A slate of debate positions plus the mandatory "Do nothing" is therefore a caper putting a question to its members, settled by the same ranked count and never handed to the market – so a passing ballot no longer implies that anything happens. The full kind list is in Proposals (/wiki/governance/proposals) . Each half borrows a differen…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…is five rather than open-ended, and why the pass threshold falls as options are added rather than staying fixed. The threshold’s absolute figure does fall as options are added – 75% of cast weight on a two-option ballot, 30% on a five-option one – but the bar itself does not soften, because the most a Borda leader can take falls in exactly the same proportion. Under complete rankings each ballot contributes n(n − 1)/2 of weight and a unanimous first place takes n − 1 of it, so a leader’s ceiling is 2/n at every ballot size. A threshold of 1.5/n is therefore three-quarters of that ceiling, and half again an even split, whether the slate holds two options or five (apply_borda in contracts/common/src/lib.rs; settle_proposal in contracts/logic/src/lib.rs). Its weighting is neither pur…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…ues, But Bet Beliefs (https://web.archive.org/web/20241231175101/https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html) – archived; GMU has retired the original hostmason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html) – Hanson's original statement of the proposal, live at GMU (re-checked 30 August 2026). - Bryan Ford, Delegative D…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

Topic Collective decision-maki…· Futarchy · Liquid On Caper None of the above – proposals resolve on price (spot vs a seven-day TWAP baseline)Borda ballot on a participation-weighted stake, then a 48-hour market veto; see FAQ (/wiki/help/faq) …n (/wiki/governance/execution)

A voting mechanism is the rule…tity. Voting on Caper Caper uses none of the mechanisms above, and since August 2026 it does not collect ballots at all. A proposal (/wiki/governance/proposals) names one on-chain action and locks a baseline –runs two of the families above in sequence, and a proposal has to clear both. A proposal (/wiki/governance/proposals) puts between two and five ranked options to the caper's members – at least one of which must be "Do nothing". Every ballot ranks all of them, and the contract folds the ballots with a Borda count, weighting each by (t·v)/(V·T): the capvoter's seven-day time-weighted average token price. It then sitstoken balance multiplied by their accumulated vote tokens, over the vote-token supply times the circulating supply frozen when the proposal was raised. The leading option carries the tally only if it holds at least 1.5 / N of all weight cast – 75% with two options, 30% with five – and only if it is not the "Do nothing" option. A ballot that passes does not execute anything. It authorises someone to open fora forty-eight-hours, during which the action is public and members trade or do not. When the window closes, anyone can settle it: the proposal passes if the live price on the caper's bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) is at or above the baseline, an optimistic window, which freezes the caper's trailing seven-day time-weighted average price as a baseline. The action goes ahead only if the price averaged over that window is at or above the baseline. Holding is consent; selling, hard enough and for long enough to hold the average down, is the veto. Each half borrows a different family's problems. The ballot is a Borda count, so it inherits Borda's (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/ranked-and-alternative-ballot-methods) known weakness – sensitivity to irrelevant alternatives – which is why the option ceiling is five rather than open-ended, and why the pass threshold faills if it is below. Holding is consent; selling is the objection. Placed against the familas options are added rather than staying fixed. Its weighting is neither pure token-weighted voting nor quadratic (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quadratic-voting-and-funding) : multiplying stake by an earned, untransferable participation record means capital alone never carries abov vote, that puts Caper in twoough capital is not shut out of earning that record either, since vote tokens accrue ofn themrades as well ats once. Its shape ballots. The second half is optimistic governance (/w…optimistic-governance) – the proposaldecision is assumed to passstand and the work is in objecting …utarchy) instinct applied to a single spot priceone price series rather than to a pair of cond…no quorum and no turnout floor, so an indifferent caper passes proposals – silence resolves as consent, anywhere in the sequence: the threshold is a share of the weight actually cast, not of the weight that exists, so a single ballot can carry a proposal to the window if nobody else votes – the deliberate inverse of the quorum designs surveyed in quorum an…uorum-and-threshold-design) . And objectingThat is survivable only because the second phase does not need turnout to work: silence there resolves as consent, but so does every member who reads the proposal and declines to sell. And objecting in the second phase is the same act as leaving (…ture. What the design rests on, then, is the cost of moving a price…lding it there – which is why both the baseline isand the verdict are time-weighted oaver seven dayages rather than readings from a single moment. For the…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…tity. Voting on Caper Caper takes the combining route. Decisions are made with ranked-choice voting (/wiki/governance/voting) overuses none of the mechanisms above, and since August 2026 it does not collect ballots at all. A proposals (/wiki/governance/proposals) that can carry realnames one on-chain actions, and weight is read from each member's live governance balance when the ballot is cast — then clamped at the tally to what they still hold —locks a baseline – the caper's seven-day time-weighted average token price. It then sits open for forty-eight hours, during whilech the requirement that influence be earned one vote at a time closes the flash-loan door that sank Beanstalk. The distinctive part is what weight is made of: it grows with both the stake you hold and the participation you've actually shown, so influence accrues to members who show up rather than to capital that merely passes through. That same earned weight sets each member's claim on the treasury at exit (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) — voice and exit are the same number — which keeps governance honest without leaning on quorum alone. The specifics live on the linked governance pages; this article is the map of the wider territory they sit in. For the on-chain governance landscape specifically, see DAO governance models (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/fundamentals/dao-governance-models) action is public and members trade or do not. When the window closes, anyone can settle it: the proposal passes if the live price on the caper's bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) is at or above the baseline, and fails if it is below. Holding is consent; selling is the objection. Placed against the families above, that puts Caper in two of them at once. Its shape is optimistic governance (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/optimistic-governance) – the proposal is assumed to pass and the work is in objecting – but where Aragon's optimistic plugins and UMA's oSnap hand the veto to a named guardian or a bonded challenger, Caper hands it to the market, which is the futarchy (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/futarchy) instinct applied to a single spot price rather thand the cornerstone What is a DAO? (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/fundamentals/what-is-a-dao) . Read against the families above, that places Caper in the Borda column with two guardrails bolted on. Compulsoryo a pair of conditional markets. The trade is legibility for cost: there are no extra markets to bootstrap and no liquidity to fragment, but the signal is coarser, since a price that moved for unrelated reasons during the window is indistinguishable from a deliberate veto. Two properties fuoll ranking removes the bullet-voting escape that lets a voter starve the rest of the field, and an automatic Do nothing option on every proposal – so the option count is always one more than the proposer wrote – makes rejection a result the count can produce rather than a quorum it can fail to reach. The pass mark compares more easily than it looks:ow that are unusual enough to state directly. There is no quorum and no turnout floor, so an indifferent caper passes proposals – silence resolves as consent, the deliberate inverse of the quorum designs surveyed in quorum and threshold design (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quorum-and-threshold-design) . And objecting is the same act as leaving (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) : a member who would have exited over a proposal blocks it on the way out, at a real price rather than a free signature. What the design rests on, then, is the mcost any option can take of the Borda pool is 2 / N, so the 1.5 / N threshold is three-quarters of unanimity at every ballot size, and a single proposed action against Do nothing is a plain 75% supermajority of weight. The derivation, and the compromise outcomes that open up once a ballot carries five options, are on votingof moving a price and holding it there – which is why the baseline is time-weighted over seven days rather than read from a single moment. For the on-chain governance landscape this sits in, see DAO governance models (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/fundamentals/dao-governance-models) and the cornerstone What is a DAO? (/wiki/dao-governance/votingconcepts/fundamentals/what-is-a-dao) . References Quadratic vot…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

Ranked-ballot voting Caper resolves proposals with a ranked ballot scored by Borda count: you rank every option, each rank’s points scale by your vote weight, and the option that clears the supermajority threshold wins. CAPER PROTOCOLRanked-ballot votingBORDA COUNTRANK EVERY OPTION · BORDA COUNTA ballot with 4 optionspoints = N − 1 − rank11st choice3 pts22nd choice2 pts33rd choice1 pts44th choice0 ptsHOW THE TALLY RESOLVES1Your points on each option are scaled byyour vote weight w.2Every voter’s weighted points add up peroption.3The option with the most weight wins —if it clears 1.5 / N of the total.You must rank every option — no bullet voting. One soulbound vote token per ballot.Every option ranked; a supermajority decides.caper.networkRank every option · Borda count · 1.5 / N supermajority.

Topic Collective decision-maki…· Futarchy · Liquid On Caper Ranked-choice, weighted by stake and participationNone of the above – proposals resolve on price (spot vs a seven-day TWAP baseline); see FAQ (/wiki/help/faq) Related Voting (/wiki/gover…n (/wiki/governance/execution)

A voting mechanism is the rule…ues, But Bet Beliefs (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html) web.archive.org/web/20241231175101/https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html) – archived; GMU has retired the original host. - Bryan Ford, Delegative D…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule… the treasury at exit (/wiki/governance/executionfoundations/leaving-a-caper) — voice and exit are the sa…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…undamentals/what-is-a-dao) . Read against the families above, that places Caper in the Borda column with two guardrails bolted on. Compulsory full ranking removes the bullet-voting escape that lets a voter starve the rest of the field, and an automatic Do nothing option on every proposal – so the option count is always one more than the proposer wrote – makes rejection a result the count can produce rather than a quorum it can fail to reach. The pass mark compares more easily than it looks: the most any option can take of the Borda pool is 2 / N, so the 1.5 / N threshold is three-quarters of unanimity at every ballot size, and a single proposed action against Do nothing is a plain 75% supermajority of weight. The derivation, and the compromise outcomes that open up once a ballot carries five options, are on voting (/wiki/governance/voting) . References Quadratic voting a…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…ned weight sets each member's pro-rata claim on the treasury at exit…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…d Gitcoin Grants (/wiki/daos/organizations/public-goods/gitcoin-dao) ), a…ht is read from each member's live governance balance at a past snapshot block —when the ballot is cast — then clamped at the tally to what they still hold — while the requirement that influence be earned one vote at a time closinges the flash-loan door that sank…O governance models (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/fundamentals/dao-gov…one What is a DAO? (/wiki/daos-governance/concepts/fundamentals/what-is…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…ind Gitcoin Grants (/wiki/dao/ecosystems/organizations/public-goods/gitcoin-dao) ), applies the s…O governance models (/wiki/daos/concepts/fundamentals/dao-governance-models) and th…one What is a DAO? (/wiki/daos/concepts/fundamentals/what-is-a-dao) . References …w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

Ranked-ballot voting Caper resolves proposals with a ranked ballot scored by Borda count: you rank every option, each rank’s points scale by your vote weight, and the option that clears the supermajority threshold wins. CAPER PROTOCOLRanked-ballot votingBORDA COUNTRANK EVERY OPTION · BORDA COUNTA ballot with 4 optionspoints = N − 1 − rank11st choice3 pts22nd choice2 pts33rd choice1 pts44th choice0 ptsHOW THE TALLY RESOLVES1Your points on each option are scaled byyour vote weight w.2Every voter’s weighted points add up peroption.3The option with the most weight wins —if it clears 1.5 / N of the total.You must rank every option — no bullet voting. One soulbound vote token per ballot.Every option ranked; a supermajority decides.caper.networkRank every option · Borda count · 1.5 / N supermajority.

A voting mechanism is the rule…ic funding (the engine behind Gitcoin Grants (/wiki/dao/ecosystem/gitcoin-dao) ), applies the same square-roo…e wider territory they sit in. For the on-chain governance land…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

A voting mechanism is the rule…ed by Curve's veCRV (https://docs.curve.finance/curve_dao/voting-escrow/voting-escrow/readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.html) , tie weight to commitment: …oting Escrow (veCRV) (https://docs.curve.finance/curve_dao/voting-escrow/voting-escrow/readthedocs.io/dao-vecrv.html) . - Wikipedia, Arrow's imp…w%27s_impossibility_theorem) .

Topic Collective decision-making Core trade-off Capital-weighted ↔ participation / identity-weighted Families Token-weighted · Quadratic · Conviction · Ranked-choice · Futarchy · Liquid On Caper Ranked-choice, weighted by stake and participation Related Voting (/wiki/governance/voting) , Proposals (/wiki/governance/proposals) , Execution (/wiki/governance/execution)

A voting mechanism is the rule that turns a group's individual preferences into a single collective decision. Two mechanisms can take the same ballots and reach opposite outcomes, so the choice of mechanism is itself one of the most consequential decisions any organization makes. For a DAO it is doubly so: the rule is encoded in a contract, runs without a referee, and is exposed to adversaries who can hold tokens, borrow them, or mint fresh identities at will. Every mechanism sits somewhere on one central axis: capital-weighted against participation- or identity-weighted. Capital weighting (one token, one vote) is naturally resistant to fake accounts — buying influence means buying the scarce token — but it concentrates power in the wealthiest holders. Identity weighting (one person, one vote) is egalitarian but collapses the moment one actor can pose as many people. Most of the designs below are attempts to move along that axis without falling off either end. Aragon frames the same landscape by the "input space" (https://blog.aragon.org/a-taxonomy-of-voting-methods/) a ballot gives the voter — the richer the input (a rank, a score, a budget of vote credits), the more faithfully it captures what people actually want. Token-weighted (coin) voting The default in on-chain governance: voting power is proportional to governance tokens held, and a proposal passes when support clears a threshold — often alongside a quorum (a minimum of the supply that must participate) and a proposal threshold (a minimum stake required to even put something to a vote). It is popular because it is simple, legible, and Sybil-resistant by construction. Its weaknesses are equally well known: - Plutocracy. Whales decide. Studies of large DAOs repeatedly find voting power concentrated in well under 1% of participants, with the long tail effectively unrepresented. - Voter apathy. A single small holder's vote rarely changes an outcome, so most don't cast one; turnout in the single-digit percentages is common, which means a determined minority can carry a proposal. - Vote-buying and bribery. As Vitalik Buterin argues in Moving beyond coin voting governance (https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html) , a voter who borrows governance tokens has "no financial exposure" to the outcome — they can back a value-destroying decision and feel none of the damage. Voters are collectively accountable but never individually so. The sharpest illustration is the Beanstalk attack of April 2022. An attacker took roughly a billion dollars in flash loans, converted them to the protocol's governance stake within a single transaction, instantly commanded a supermajority, and passed a proposal that drained about $182M from the treasury — all before the loan had to be repaid. The lesson DAOs took from it: voting weight must be snapshotted at a block in the past, never read live, or governance can be rented by the second. ( CoinDesk (https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/17/attacker-drains-182m-from-beanstalk-stablecoin-protocol) ) Quadratic voting Quadratic voting (QV) lets a voter cast multiple votes on an issue they care about, but the cost of votes rises with their square: one vote costs one credit, three votes cost nine, ten votes cost a hundred. Because the marginal cost of influence climbs steadily, people end up buying votes roughly in proportion to how much they care — so QV surfaces how much a voter cares, not just which side they are on, while making it ruinously expensive for any single party to dominate. Its formal case was made by Steven Lalley and Glen Weyl in Quadratic Voting (https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Rodrik/workshop%2014-15/Weyl-Quadratic_Voting.pdf) (2015): under price-taking behaviour QV is the only rule that is always efficient, and in a large electorate every symmetric equilibrium of the QV game converges on the efficient outcome, with the residual waste shrinking roughly as one over the number of voters — a direct answer to the "tyranny of the majority" that one-person-one-vote invites. QV's roots are in corporate governance. Eric Posner and Glen Weyl first floated it in Quadratic Vote Buying, Square Root Voting, and Corporate Governance (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/06/06/quadratic-vote-buying-square-root-voting-and-corporate-governance/) (2013), proposing that shareholders cast votes equal to the square root of their holdings so a large holder cannot simply steamroll the small ones, then developed the full argument in Quadratic Voting as Efficient Corporate Governance (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245) (University of Chicago Law Review, 2014): decoupling votes from shares and pricing them quadratically protects minority shareholders and, they argue, yields efficient outcomes "under reasonable conditions." Vitalik Buterin and Glen Weyl carried the idea into crypto in Liberation Through Radical Decentralization (https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/liberation-through-radical-decentralization-22fc4bedc2ac) (2018), where a thousand votes cost a million credits — minority capture becomes prohibitively dear — but only if every voter is a verifiably separate person, a requirement squarely at odds with pseudonymous wallets. The idea has had real-world outings too: in 2019 the Colorado House of Representatives gave each legislator a budget of 100 vote credits to prioritize its appropriations backlog, and the quadratic cost forced them to reveal real priorities instead of rubber-stamping everything. That identity assumption is QV's fatal flaw on-chain: split your tokens across many wallets and the quadratic penalty evaporates, so QV is only safe atop a working proof-of-personhood (#sybil-resistance-and-identity) layer. The intensity it rewards can also be turned against it — Patty and Penn show in Uncertainty, polarization, and proposal incentives under quadratic voting (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-017-0406-3) (Public Choice, 2017) that once voters also set the agenda, QV rewards floating more divisive, higher-variance proposals; the same intensity-sensitivity that makes QV efficient on a fixed question pulls the menu of questions toward polarization. Its better-known cousin, quadratic funding (the engine behind Gitcoin Grants), applies the same square-root math to donations so that the number of backers matters more than the size of any one cheque. There is a deeper, theory-side caveat to any mechanism that tries to read intensity rather than mere rank. Ehlers, Majumdar, Mishra and Sen prove in Continuity and Incentive Compatibility in Cardinal Voting Mechanisms (https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1866/13352/Cahier_2016_04.pdf?sequence=1) (2016; Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2020) that, with no money changing hands, any cardinal voting rule that is both strategy-proof and continuous must collapse back to an ordinal one — it can use voters' rankings but not how strongly they feel. Cardinal schemes escape this only by attaching a genuine cost to intensity, which is exactly what QV's vote credits do and an ordinary score ballot does not. Conviction voting Conviction voting removes the deadline. Instead of a yes/no snapshot, voters stake tokens on the proposals they support and their conviction accumulates the longer the stake stays put; a proposal executes automatically once its built-up conviction crosses a threshold scaled to how much of the treasury it asks for. Support becomes a continuous signal rather than a moment, which makes last-minute, rented-capital swings useless — you cannot buy time-weighted conviction in one block. The model has a rigorous backing. Michael Zargham of BlockScience recasts collective choice as a signal-processing problem in Sensor Networks and Social Choice (https://github.com/BlockScience/conviction/blob/master/social-sensorfusion.pdf) (2018): individual preferences are continuously fused, like noisy sensor readings, into a smoothed estimate of what the community wants, so a vote becomes ongoing preference estimation rather than a discrete ballot — the formal reason conviction should grow with sustained stake. Pioneered by the Commons Stack and first run in production by 1Hive's Gardens (https://github.com/1Hive/conviction-voting-app) , the approach has also been proposed for funding public goods straight out of protocol issuance — see the conviction-staked inflation funding (https://github.com/ethereum-funding/blockrewardsfunding/issues/39#issuecomment-478165174) discussion — on the argument that time-weighting raises the cost of bribery, since an attacker has to sustain a bribe rather than pay once. It suits continuous funding decisions but still rests on a capital-weighted base and is, by design, slow. Futarchy Futarchy, proposed by economist Robin Hanson, splits a decision into two questions and routes each to the tool best suited to it: "vote on values, but bet on beliefs." Token holders democratically choose a metric of success (say, treasury value a year out); prediction markets then decide which proposal is most likely to raise that metric, and the market's verdict carries the decision. It puts factual forecasts in the hands of those willing to put money behind them, but depends on liquid, hard-to-manipulate markets and a welfare metric that cannot be gamed. The market-design fine print matters as much as the idea: experimental economics has long shown that the format of a market changes how people behave inside it. Coppinger, Smith and Titus found that Dutch and first-price sealed-bid auctions — formats theory treats as equivalent — drew different bidding in the lab, with bidders straying from the risk-neutral predictions the theory assumed ( Incentives and Behavior in English, Dutch and Sealed-Bid Auctions (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5210235_Incentives_and_Behavior_in_English_Dutch_and_Sealed-Bid_Auctions) , 1980). For a system that hands the decision to a market, that is the warning: the betting rules are part of the mechanism, not a neutral wrapper around it — one reason futarchy remains more experimented-with than adopted. Ranked-choice and other preference methods When a vote has more than two options, how you collect and tally preferences matters as much as who votes. The main families: - Ranked-choice / instant-runoff (RCV/IRV). Voters rank the options. If no option has a majority of first choices, the lowest is eliminated and its votes transfer to their next preference, repeating until one option holds a majority. This extracts far more information than a binary ballot and rarely "wastes" a vote on a losing favourite. - Condorcet methods. Elect the option that would beat every other in a head-to-head matchup, when such an option exists — the most resistant to spoilers and strategic ranking. - Borda count. Award descending points by rank position and sum them; simple, but sensitive to irrelevant alternatives. - Approval and score voting. Cardinal methods: approve any number of options (approval), or score each on a scale (score/range). Easy to tally and friendly to consensus candidates — and their incentives can be made sharp: Shah and Zhou show in Approval Voting and Incentives in Crowdsourcing (https://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/shaha15.html) (ICML 2015) that pairing approval ballots with the right strictly-proper scoring rule yields the unique "no-free-lunch" scheme under which honestly reporting the set of options you find plausible is the optimal strategy. No ranked method is perfect, and that isn't a bug to be fixed: Arrow's impossibility theorem (Kenneth Arrow, 1951) proves that with three or more options, no ranked voting rule can satisfy a short list of obviously-desirable fairness conditions at once. The practical takeaway is comparative, not defeatist — some methods (Condorcet) fail those conditions far less often than others (plurality), so "least bad for this decision" is the right question. Liquid democracy and vote-escrow Liquid democracy lets each voter either vote directly or delegate their weight to someone they trust — and delegations are transitive and revocable, so expertise can pool without anyone permanently handing over their voice. The modern framing comes from Bryan Ford's 2002 Delegative Democracy (https://bford.info/2002/05/15/deleg/) . It fights apathy by letting busy holders lend their weight to active delegates — though, as DAO delegation data shows, it can also quietly re-concentrate power in a handful of large delegates. Vote-escrow (ve) models, popularized by Curve's veCRV (https://docs.curve.finance/curve_dao/voting-escrow/voting-escrow/) , tie weight to commitment: lock tokens for up to four years and your voting power scales with how long you lock, then decays as the lock runs down. The aim is to hand the steering wheel to long-term aligned holders rather than mercenary, transient capital — at the cost of liquidity and, in practice, a secondary market in "bribes" for locked votes. Off-chain and on-chain voting Where a vote runs is a design choice in itself: - Off-chain (e.g. Snapshot). Votes are wallet signatures over a past token snapshot — gasless and high-turnout, but the result is only a signal until someone (usually a multisig) executes it. Cheap participation, with a trust assumption at the end. - On-chain (Governor-style). Proposals, votes, a timelock, and execution all live in the contract — fully trustless, but slower and more expensive to participate in. - Bridges. Optimistic execution (post a passed off-chain result on-chain, executable unless challenged) and holographic consensus (a prediction market "boosts" high-signal proposals so a large DAO can decide without full quorum on everything) try to keep the cheapness of off-chain with the finality of on-chain. The contract can also defend the clock itself. Wait-for-quiet voting — proposed by Dominic Williams and used in the Internet Computer's network governance — pushes a proposal's deadline back every time the leading outcome flips, so a large holder cannot lurk until turnout is thin and snipe the result in the final block; the vote closes only after a stretch of quiet in which the lead holds. It is the timing-side complement to reading voting weight from a past snapshot block — the fix DAOs adopted after Beanstalk. Sybil resistance and identity Every mechanism that moves away from pure capital weighting — quadratic, one-person-one-vote, reputation — needs a way to stop one actor from minting many identities. Proof-of-personhood aims to certify "one human, one account" without full doxxing: social-graph analysis (BrightID), curated registries with vouching (Proof of Humanity), or biometric uniqueness (World ID). It is the precondition for egalitarian voting on a permissionless network, and the reason token voting persists as the default: tokens give you Sybil resistance for free, while every alternative has to build an identity layer first. Choosing a mechanism There is no universally best rule. The choice is a trade-off between decentralization, resistance to manipulation, and broad participation — push hard on any one and the others give. Token voting buys manipulation-resistance and simplicity at the cost of equality; quadratic and identity schemes buy equality at the cost of needing a trustworthy identity layer; conviction and ve-models buy resistance to rented capital at the cost of speed and liquidity. Recent research even argues that no purely wallet-weighted rule can fully escape plutocracy against a rational attacker — which is why mature designs increasingly combine stake with something money can't cheaply buy: time, participation, or verified identity. Voting on Caper Caper takes the combining route. Decisions are made with ranked-choice voting (/wiki/governance/voting) over proposals (/wiki/governance/proposals) that can carry real on-chain actions, and weight is read from each member's governance balance at a past snapshot block — closing the flash-loan door that sank Beanstalk. The distinctive part is what weight is made of: it grows with both the stake you hold and the participation you've actually shown, so influence accrues to members who show up rather than to capital that merely passes through. That same earned weight sets each member's pro-rata claim on the treasury at exit (/wiki/governance/execution) — voice and exit are the same number — which keeps governance honest without leaning on quorum alone. The specifics live on the linked governance pages; this article is the map of the wider territory they sit in.r the on-chain governance landscape specifically, see DAO governance models (/wiki/dao/concepts/dao-governance-models) and the cornerstone What is a DAO? (/wiki/dao/concepts/what-is-a-dao) . References Quadratic voting and cardinal mechanisms: - Steven P. Lalley & E. Glen Weyl, Quadratic Voting (https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Rodrik/workshop%2014-15/Weyl-Quadratic_Voting.pdf) — working paper (2015); condensed as "Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy," AEA Papers & Proceedings 108 (2018). - Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl, Quadratic Vote Buying, Square Root Voting, and Corporate Governance (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/06/06/quadratic-vote-buying-square-root-voting-and-corporate-governance/) — Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (2013). - Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl, Quadratic Voting as Efficient Corporate Governance (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245) — University of Chicago Law Review 81 (2014). - Vitalik Buterin & E. Glen Weyl, Liberation Through Radical Decentralization (https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/liberation-through-radical-decentralization-22fc4bedc2ac) (2018). - John W. Patty & Elizabeth Maggie Penn, Uncertainty, polarization, and proposal incentives under quadratic voting (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-017-0406-3) — Public Choice 172 (2017): 109–124. - Lars Ehlers, Dipjyoti Majumdar, Debasis Mishra & Arunava Sen, Continuity and Incentive Compatibility in Cardinal Voting Mechanisms (https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1866/13352/Cahier_2016_04.pdf?sequence=1) — Université de Montréal (2016); Journal of Mathematical Economics 88 (2020). Preference methods, auctions, and conviction: - Nihar B. Shah & Dengyong Zhou, Approval Voting and Incentives in Crowdsourcing (https://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/shaha15.html) — Proceedings of ICML (2015). - Vicki M. Coppinger, Vernon L. Smith & Jon A. Titus, Incentives and Behavior in English, Dutch and Sealed-Bid Auctions (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5210235_Incentives_and_Behavior_in_English_Dutch_and_Sealed-Bid_Auctions) — Economic Inquiry 18 (1980). - Michael Zargham (BlockScience), Sensor Networks and Social Choice (https://github.com/BlockScience/conviction/blob/master/social-sensorfusion.pdf) (2018) — the signal-processing basis for conviction voting. - Conviction-staked inflation funding (https://github.com/ethereum-funding/blockrewardsfunding/issues/39#issuecomment-478165174) — Ethereum public-goods funding discussion. - Dominic Williams, Using "wait-for-quiet" voting (https://medium.com/@dominic_w/using-wait-for-quiet-voting-in-the-dao-12ecd9d9ccc3) — deadline extension as a defence against last-minute swings. Further reading: - Aragon, A taxonomy of voting methods (https://blog.aragon.org/a-taxonomy-of-voting-methods/) (2021). - Vitalik Buterin, Moving beyond coin voting governance (https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html) (2021). - CoinDesk, Attacker Drains $182M From Beanstalk (https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/17/attacker-drains-182m-from-beanstalk-stablecoin-protocol) (2022) — the flash-loan governance attack. - The Colorado Sun, Colorado's experiment with quadratic voting (https://coloradosun.com/2019/05/28/quadratic-voting-colorado-house-budget/) (2019). - Robin Hanson, Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html) . - Bryan Ford, Delegative Democracy (https://bford.info/2002/05/15/deleg/) (2002). - Curve, Voting Escrow (veCRV) (https://docs.curve.finance/curve_dao/voting-escrow/voting-escrow/) . - Wikipedia, Arrow's impossibility theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem) .