Singaporean Researchers Devise More Effective DAO Voting
Researchers at the Singapore University of Social Sciences have come up with a more efficient governance model for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).
DAO governance review
The scientists presented their work via a paper titled “Voting Schemes in DAO Governance,” which was published earlier this week. The paper is due to appear in the Annual Review of Fintech in due course.
The research paper initially sets out with a review of the different forms of voting currently used to affect DAO governance in the various early stage projects that are already up and running. Having taken a deep dive into existing approaches, the research team of Qinxu Ding, Weibiao Xu, Zhiguo Wang and David Kuo Chuen Lee decided that they could go one better themselves.
Their review encompassed eight current approaches including the following: token-based quorum voting, knowledge-extractable voting, conviction voting and reputation-based voting. Each voting scheme was then evaluated based on the following factors:
Efficiency: An assessment of the speed at which proposals are selected and approved.Fairness: Each voter should have equal rights to vote.Scalability: The degree to which storage, computation and communication needs can be adjusted relative to the number of voters.Robustness: An assessment of the relative resistance of the voting scheme to attacks and collusion.Incentive Schemes: The extent to which DAO members are motivated to vote.
Following on from that analysis, the scientists put forward a hypothetical voting mechanism with design considerations relative to fully decentralized and permissionless DAO governance. When it came to ratings, the holographic consensus approach scored highest, with a “high” rating in the categories of efficiency, fairness and robustness, dropping down to medium when it came to scalability. None of the other approaches came close.
In trying to go one better, the team took the holographic consensus approach and set out to create their own hypothetical voting mechanism based on this model. As evidenced from the paper, they tried to effect improvements to this approach:
“We know that the downside of the conviction voting mechanism is that it takes time to approve an urgent proposal. To address this concern, we introduce a blind betting mechanism: each member could choose whether to bet on any proposals with a certain number of their tokens.”
The researcher’s hypothetical model allows stakeholders to gamble their tokens on the likelihood of a proposal passing or failing. The logic with this approach, they claim, is that it would speed up the governance process, while making it more robust at the same time.
In concluding remarks, the researchers acknowledged that all approaches were not without their pros and cons. They point out that the further development of DAOs shouldn’t be confined to a static organizational future. While they believe that their own hypothetical scheme is in theory superior, they acknowledge that it too has flaws. With that, the realities of implementing it in the real world may be a challenge.
