A team of researchers at the Singapore University of Social Sciences recently evaluated existing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) voting schemes to determine which would be most effective.
Ultimately, the researchers concluded that existing popular voting schemes each had strengths and weaknesses, and that a new paradigm that combined what they believed to be the best features of each would be "more effective" than the status quo.
The team's paper, called "Voting Schemes in DAO Governance," analyzes eight current techniques for DAO governance and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. Techniques reviewed include: token-based quorum voting, quadratic voting, weighted and reputation-based voting, extractable knowledge voting , multisig voting, holographic consensus, belief voting, and anger exit voting. Each voting scheme is rated according to five vectors, including efficiency (proposal selection and approval speed), fairness (regarding voter equality), scalability (ability to adjust storage/computation /communication according to the number of voters), attacks and collision) and incentive schemes (whether the design incentives voter behavior).
The Holographic Consensus scenario received the highest overall score of "High" in all categories except the "Robustness" category. Once the analysis was complete, the researchers set out to create “a hypothetical voting mechanism for purely decentralized and permissionless DAO g overnance.” To Achieve This, They Devned the Scheme to Speed Up Convice Voting Through A "Holographic MeChanism". Tage of the Convice Voting Mechanism is that it takes time to approve urgent proposals. To solve this problem, we Introduced a blind betting mechanism: each member can choose whether to stake any proposal with a certain amount of tokens.”
This approach would allow stakeholders to stake tokens on the adoption or rejection of a proposal, and depending on the outcome, the proposal would be accelerated or slowed down potentially improving the overall speed and robustness of DAO governance.
The team's proposed scheme would also implement an incentivized paradigm in which those who bet "veto" sacrifice their tokens when the event consensus goes to those who voted "yes" and vice versa. Of course. According to the researchers, this ensures that stakeh older will be incentivized to submit “good proposals that are more likely to pass and receive rewards,” thereby expediting the processing of proposals deemed both urgent and good.
The researchers conclude by claiming that their proposed scheme outperforms current efforts, but they acknowledge that it is not without its inherent problems: "Our hypothetical scheme has a better design that incorporates key features of the other schemes. However, it is not perfect and may face challenges during implementation. Nonetheless, our goal is to stimulate innovative design thinking."
