DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs
read the original abstract
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) use smart contracts to foster communities working toward common goals. Existing definitions of decentralization, however-the 'D' in DAO-fall short of capturing key properties characteristic of diverse and equitable participation. We propose a new metric called Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE, pronounced ''vibe'') that formalizes a broad notion of decentralization in voting on DAO proposals. VBE measures the similarity of participants' utility functions across a set of proposals. We use VBE to prove a number of results about the decentralizing effects of vote delegation, proposal bundling, bribery, and quadratic voting. Our results lead to practical suggestions for enhancing DAO decentralization. One of our results highlights the risk of systemic bribery with increasing DAO decentralization. To show that this threat is realistic, we present the first practical realization of a Dark DAO, a proposed mechanism for privacy-preserving corruption of identity systems, including those used in DAO voting. Our Dark-DAO prototype uses trusted execution environments (TEEs) in the Oasis Sapphire blockchain for attacks on Ethereum DAOs. It demonstrates that Dark DAOs constitute a realistic future concern for DAO governance.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 7 Pith papers
-
Mapping Partisan Fault Lines Within DAOs
Clustering of voting dissimilarity patterns in Nouns DAO identifies 90% of future fork participants in the last 44 proposals, far above the 47% rate in randomized controls.
-
Toward Web 4.0: Bidirectional Trust between AI Agents and Blockchain
The paper delivers a systematization of knowledge on AI agent-blockchain interactions via a bidirectional trust framework, an Agent-Blockchain Interaction Model, a five-dimensional evaluation lens, and nine identified...
-
Centralization and Stability in Formal Constitutions
Only dictatorships are self-maintaining under i.i.d. unbiased beliefs with arbitrary tie-breaking, while rules with minimal winning coalitions of size at most 2 are stable under pessimistic beliefs and status-quo tie-...
-
The Activist's Guide to the Decentralized Social Universe: A Framework for Exploring How Decentralized Social Networks Can Support Collective Action
A conceptual framework is introduced that links activist needs to decentralized social network features and is applied to compare Mastodon and Bluesky plus example communities.
-
The Activist's Guide to the Decentralized Social Universe: A Framework for Exploring How Decentralized Social Networks Can Support Collective Action
A framework is introduced that links activist needs (minimal overhead, community building, safety, sustainability) to DSN affordances and is applied to compare Mastodon and Bluesky plus example communities.
-
On the Centralization of Governance Power in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
Study of 48 Ethereum DAOs finds that core governance mechanisms systematically centralize voting power rather than promote decentralization.
-
Fairness in Token Delegation: Mitigating Voting Power Concentration in DAOs
Empirical study of DAO forums finds frequent misalignment between token holders' stated priorities and delegate voting, worsened by ranking-based delegation interfaces.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.