Quadratic voting is a way of handling the governance voting process so that more power is given to the masses but at the same time rewarding highly interested individuals.
So far I think the type of voting that will be done here will be of the style “one token one vote”. Right?
This kind of voting heavily rewards people with big wallets and might end up leaving most people (who probably don’t own many tokens but make up for most of the users on the platform) alienated.
Has any of you have had any experience with quadratic voting? Do you guys think it would be possible to implement something on that line for the governance proposals?
People like to complain about the “Shareholder value thesis”, as it leads to centralization and bad incentives.
Token voting leads us down a similar road! I think Uniswap has taken a great step by involving users in the governance but this has to happen in an ongoing basis. Otherwise, we’re gonna end up with governance that tries to maximize token value, instead of focusing on building/maintaining a great product!
I have no information or experience regarding quadratic voting but I am definitely following this thread to learn more about it because I agree that the voting process can make the big fish even more powerful than they already are and make everyone with less than 500 uni feel like their input has zero meaning.
As @portuno mentions, delegating your share of vote power could be a solution to this potential problem but you can also say that it makes your share even more insignificant as the body you delegated towards might have interests of outcome as well.
I love that more governance systems are starting to show up in different systems and you can not expect a gold fish to have the same voice as an orca, but everyone wants to be heard and I think part of the solution to that is the type of communication we are involved in right now.
The thing with smart contracts, is that it allows to make things unimaginable for the common legislator. So if we use a little of imagination, we can create lot of new voting systems, just like the decentralized finance is creating new economics phenomens.
Im actually a lawyer irl and one of my side proyects is working on a tecnocrat constitution, which includes some new voting systems (most of them are being inspired in whats happening in DeFi right now, for now i only have the things writted down on a journal)
English is not my mother tongue, and the things are thinked to be implemented in Argentina (not right now, but in 4/5 years if crypto makes me rich and the economic crisis finally reachs its lowest point in history, maybe i have a shot at it)
Jajajajaja i´m not a team, im just a lawyer with lot of free time and weed during quarantine, but yeah sure, if you are interested i wil try to translate some ideas and post them, i will try to be active in here.
My main concern is that the power of governance can end up in the hands of CEXs like Binance because of the share volume of UNI tokens traded there. So we got a paradox here. Uniswap, as a #1 DEX, an attempt to move away from CEXs, will end up in the governor hands of CEXs… Potentially this can lead to proposal tuned against the success of Uniswap…
To that account, I am less concerned about lonely whales, but more about sea giants like CEX.
Yes but how we will find that a one user is not using multiple address ,same problem already happened in distribution of Airdrop , where people having multiple eth address got extra uni rewards.
Quadratic Voting is must else binance will become uni owner by buying and trading most uni tokens. May be CZ already holding significant amount of UNI. Having alot of UNI they can influence the governance and Uniswap will just become a acquisition of Binance.
So two things needs to be done
quadratic Voting
a Sybil resistant system ( 1 person one vote even if he hold multiple eth addresses)
This is exactly what quadratic voting tries to solve.
Let me explain to you guys what I’ve gathered from the things I’ve been reading on the subject. You can probably learn more about it if you check Vitalik’s website.
In simple terms what you have here is that people are given a set amount of tokens which with they can buy votes, depending on the motion, but the more votes you buy the more expensive your vote becomes. The way it works is using the quadratic formula, hence the name, first vote = 1 token, second vote = 2 tokens, … , nth vote = n tokens. This scales up quickly.
So how would this look with our delegation method that we have on Uniswap, well, in a way everything would have to change. voting would have to burn your tokens otherwise the strategy just wouldn’t make sense. Now this might sound bad but in reality it’s not, we wouldn’t have to burn our tokens forever but instead what you can have is cycles. So several proposals might be proposed every 3 months, and people use their tokens to vote on these proposals in a quadratic manner.
Let me put it in an algorithmic manner:
There is a period of 3 months for proposals to be presented.
Every proposal can be voted on by either YES or NO.
You can use your tokens to vote for as many proposals as you want, as much as you want in a quadratic manner. This means you could spend all your tokens voting for proposal number 1, or you could spend 50% of your tokens on proposal 1, 25% on proposal 2 and so on…
Once the voting period is over (this could be three months). Any proposals that have been accepted will be implemented. And then the cycle repeats again.
Now this isn’t incompatible with delegation at all. People with more votes would still have more power. But it is much more balanced. One wallet with a lot of coins can buy many votes, but these votes will increase in their price. So it is much cheaper for 500 different people to each buy one vote (this would be 500 tokens) than one big whale casting 500 votes (this would cost 1 + 2 + 3 + … + 500 votes).
So here the problem becomes “well, how do we deal with people making many accounts to vote”. And honestly this is the biggest problem with quadratic voting. There are probably ways to solve this second problem though, maybe you have to “buy” a credential in order to vote, i don’t really know. I think this is an interesting problem that should certainly be discussed in more detail. Like @coolcryptomaniac says we need a sybil resistant system.
I would support quadratic voting, but i dont like the idea that if you voted on one proposal you will lose voting power on other proposals that are running in the same time, because you have used up some tokens for voting on the first one.
What do you think about just having the quadratic voting implemented in the way of counting voting weights in the short term?
An interesting thing could be that, when voting the UNI tokens would be locked until the proposal end (or the last proposal end which the user voted on). And those who voted on the loser side will have their token unlock 12-24h earlier than the winning side of the tokens.
So, when a malicious proposal gets accepted or just a proposal which the loser might think its not going to the right way could exit their UNI positions prior to the winner side.
I like the idea behind quadratic voting in general, but I don’t think there is a good way to protect against “sybil attacks” when it’s used. Too easy to setup a set of accounts that share funds in order to tilt the vote into their favor.
Gitcoin lead the way with QV and show the value it brings in better distribution of power and empowering small token holders to have more impact. It is definitely a step in the right direction.
Eventually DAO’s will have to include reputation based voting system to really build a long term sustainability over the risk of vote buying
That is true about the sybil resistance, however now ethereum gas fees are high it makes it more expensive , might be disincentivizes ppl from doing it. But i think its still better than the current system
