Quadratic Voting

What is Quadratic Voting?

Quadratic Voting (QV) is a voting mechanism that ascribes a "cost" to a vote, allowing:

• voters to express the intensity of their preferences across a range of issues
• the tempering of the influence of wealthy voters, by increasing the cost of additional votes

The Quadratic Voting Plugin in Realms implements the latter feature by making the voting power of a member proportional to the square root of the number of tokens they hold.

This has the effect of increasing the voting power of minority voters compared to large token holders, increasing alignment and encouraging voter participation.

What is Sybil Resistance?

One challenge to Quadratic Voting is the potential for a single voter to create multiple accounts, split their tokens between them, and vote multiple times.

This is known as a Sybil Attack.

To mitigate this in Realms, the Civic Pass Plugin is also used, to ensure that each voter is a unique individual.

This means that Quadratic Voting DAOs in Realms require voters to have a Civic Pass. For more details, see civic.com (opens in a new tab).

Creating a QV DAO from Scratch

Adapting an existing DAO to use QV

Step 1 - Add Civic Pass Plugin

Advanced Configuration

Coefficients

The QV plugin uses the following formula for calculating the voting power of a member:

The coefficients a, b, and c can be configured by the DAO creator, but are set as default to 1,0,0 respectively(*), which has the effect of making the voting power of a member equal to the square root of the number of tokens they hold.

• The a coefficient in fact depends on the number of decimal places of the token, and is formally calculated as $\sqrt{10^\textrm{ tokenDecimals}}$

Setting the coefficients to different values can have the effect of making the voting power of a member more or less sensitive to the number of tokens they hold. For extreme examples:

• Setting a and c to 0 and b to 1 would make the voting power of a member equal to the number of tokens they hold.
• Setting a and b to 0 and c to 1 would make the voting power of a member equal to 1, regardless of the number of tokens they hold, resulting in a one-person one-vote system.

Civic Pass

The choice of Civic Pass type can be configured by the DAO creator, and can be set to any of the available Civic Pass types. However, it is worth noting that not all Civic Passes are suitable for sybil resistance. Therefore it is recommended to use the default Civic Pass type to secure your DAO.

Circulating Token Supply Factor

When configuring your DAO, you have the option to set the circulating token supply to a percentage of the total token supply.

This allows a DAO to configure its maximum voter weight, which, in a quadratic voting DAO, is based on the token distribution and is typically less than the total token supply.

This is particularly useful if you know the upper limit will not exceed a fixed value.

For example, if 25% of the total supply is held by a single entity, that votes in a block, then you can set the circulating supply factor to 75% + the square root of the number of tokens held by the entity.

Approval Quorum

The approval quorum is the amount of votes required for a proposal to pass. It is set as a percentage of the circulating voter weight. Combined with the circulating total supply factor, this allows a DAO to configure the amount of votes needed for a proposal to pass, and adapt it over time.

This value should be used when the max voter weight is not known, or varies frequently.