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DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs

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arxiv 2311.03530 v1 pith:3UHWAG6J submitted 2023-11-06 cs.CR

James Austgen , Andrés Fábrega , Sarah Allen , Kushal Babel , Mahimna Kelkar , Ari Juels This is my paper · ORCID
classification cs.CR
keywords decentralizationdaosbriberydarkresultsvotingentropypractical
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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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.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 14 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. On Exercising Governance Power in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    An analysis of 48 Ethereum DAO governance contracts maps design choices across a referendum lifecycle and flags 7 DAOs as open to vote-buying and vote-sniping "governance attacks".

  2. Social Dynamics of DAOs: Power, Onboarding, and Inclusivity

    cs.CY 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    DAOs reproduce financial and cultural barriers to participation, so decentralization is a social process, not just a technical feature.

  3. Evaluating Voting Design Vulnerabilities for Retroactive Funding

    cs.GT 2025-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Quadratic voting is more resistant than mean or median voting to coordinated manipulation in RetroPGF-style allocation, based on a proof-based analysis and a simulation.

  4. Rollback-Free Cross-Chain Atomicity Through Forward-Only Correction

    cs.CR 2026-07 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    A design sketch proposes journal-and-compensate atomicity for cross-chain contracts, with no formal model, proofs, or prototype.

  5. Towards Secure and Trustworthy DAOs for Cross-Chain Governance

    cs.CR 2026-07 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    The paper proposes a layered, unvalidated security architecture for cross-chain DAO governance, folding known attacks and known cryptographic primitives into a new module diagram.

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