🔄 Alternative Systems: Beyond 1T1V
Explore reputation-based, conviction, and time-weighted voting
Understand how voting power is calculated
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0 / 5 completed🔄 Alternative Voting Systems: Beyond Simple Token Weighting
Recognizing that one-token-one-vote creates plutocracy, some DAOs experiment with alternative weighting systems. The goal: maintain Sybil resistance (you need tokens to vote) while reducing whale dominance. Three main approaches: quadratic voting (votes = square root of tokens), conviction voting (voting power grows over time), and reputation systems (earn voting power through participation). Each has trade-offs between fairness, complexity, and attack resistance.
🎮 Interactive: Voting System Comparison
Compare three voting systems with the same 5 voters. See how power distribution changes dramatically based on the weighting formula.
Linear (Standard)
votes = tokensOne token = one vote. Simple, but concentrates power.
Standard system: Voter 5 has 100x power of Voter 1 because they have 100x more tokens.
📐 Quadratic Voting: Mathematical Fairness
Votes = √(tokens). If you have 100 tokens, you get 10 votes. Someone with 10,000 tokens gets 100 votes (not 10,000). The whale has only 10x power despite 100x tokens. This dramatically reduces concentration while maintaining Sybil resistance (still need tokens to vote).
✅ Advantages
- • Reduces whale dominance significantly
- • Encourages broader participation
- • Still Sybil-resistant (need tokens)
- • Used in Gitcoin Grants (funded $50M+)
❌ Disadvantages
- • Complex to explain to users
- • Whales can split tokens across wallets
- • Reduces economic alignment incentive
- • Rare in major DAOs (implementation complexity)
⏳ Conviction Voting: Time-Weighted Power
Used by 1Hive and Commons Stack. Your voting power grows the longer you commit to a proposal. Support a proposal for 30 days? Your votes count more than someone who voted last minute. Aligns governance with long-term thinking and prevents mercenary voting (buy tokens, vote, dump).
How It Works
- 1. Stake tokens on a proposal (continuous, no deadline)
- 2. Voting power = tokens × time decay function (exponential growth)
- 3. Can change vote anytime, but conviction resets to zero
- 4. Proposal passes when conviction exceeds threshold (dynamic based on funding request size)
- 5. No single "vote close" time—decisions emerge organically
🏆 Reputation Systems: Earn Your Voice
Some DAOs experiment with non-transferable voting power earned through contributions. Complete a task? Earn reputation points. Reputation = votes. Can't be bought, only earned. Meritocracy instead of plutocracy.
Earn REP tokens through work. REP = voting power. Can't buy REP, only earn it. Result: contributors control governance, not investors.
Who decides what earns reputation? How to prevent gaming? Hard to bootstrap (no reputation = no participation initially). Most DAOs stick to tokens.
💡 Key Insight
Alternative voting systems attempt to solve the plutocracy problem but face a trilemma: you can have two of (1) Sybil resistance, (2) equal voting power, (3) economic alignment—but not all three. Token weighting = strong Sybil resistance + economic alignment, but unequal power. Quadratic voting = Sybil resistance + more equal power, but weaker economic alignment. Reputation = equal power + economic alignment (contributors decide), but weak Sybil resistance (reputation can be gamed). Most DAOs choose simple token weighting because it's the easiest to implement and hardest to game, accepting plutocracy as a tolerable cost. Alternatives exist but remain experimental and complex. Next: real-world case studies of how weighting systems shape DAO outcomes.