In Defense of Coin Voting

Coin voting fails because while voters are collectively accountable for their decisions (if everyone votes for a terrible decision, everyone's coins drop to zero), each voter is not individually accountable (if a terrible decision happens, those who supported it suffer no more than those who opposed it). Can we make a voting system that changes thi... See more

---------SIGNAL VS NOISE Social governance in DeFi applications is usually coordinated through online forums and Discord channels. Snapshot applications conduct "off-chain" voting before protocol changes are encoded on the blockchain. DeFi governance evolved organically but created a lot of noise because proposals, discussions, and votes spread acr... See more

Improving member participation in governance remains one of the hottest and most nuanced problems facing DAOs today. However, these are not new problems we are facing. Roy Lerner wrote ‘Blockchain Voter Apathy’ describing the barriers for effective governance and potential solutions for increasing voter participation over two years ago. Despite his... See more

There are two primary types of issues with coin voting that I worry about: (i) inequalities and incentive misalignments even in the absence of attackers, and (ii) outright attacks through various forms of (often obfuscated) vote buying.

Decentralized governance in some contexts is both necessary and dangerous, for reasons that I will get into in this post. How can we get the benefits of DeGov while minimizing the risks? I will argue for one key part of the answer: we need to move beyond coin voting as it exists in its present form.

The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of governance decentralization.