Quadratic Voting
A voting system where additional votes cost quadratically more, curbing whale dominance in governance.
Quadratic voting lets participants cast multiple votes on an issue, but each additional vote costs quadratically more (1 vote costs 1, 2 votes cost 4, 3 votes cost 9). This dampens the power of large holders — a whale can still express strong preference but pays sharply escalating costs, giving smaller participants proportionally more influence than simple token-weighted voting.
It’s a proposed remedy for a core DAO problem: plutocracy, where whoever holds the most governance tokens simply dictates outcomes. Quadratic funding (a related mechanism) has been used successfully to allocate grants (notably by Gitcoin) in a way that favors broad support over concentrated wealth. The catch is Sybil resistance — quadratic systems require verified unique identities, since splitting holdings across many wallets defeats the math. A promising governance experiment with a real implementation hurdle.