Scientists at the Singapore University of Social Sciences created a novel DAO voting/ regime scheme after reviewing current methods. 

A crew of researchers at the Singapore University of Social Sciences newly conducted an appraisal of existing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) voting schemes to determine which was most efficient.

The researchers eventually concluded that existing popular voting schemes each had their downsides and advantages and that a new paradigm combining what they considered to be the best features of each would be “ moreover efficient ” than the status quo.

Dubbed “ Voting Schemes in DAO Governance, ” the crew’s paper analyzes eight current techniques for the DAO regime and assesses their perceived strengths and weaknesses.

The approaches reviewed take in token-based quorum voting, quadratic voting, weighted and reputation-based voting, knowledge-extractable voting,multi-sig voting, holographic consensus, conviction voting, & rage-quitting voting.

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Each voting scheme was rated according to 5 vectors comprising efficiency (proposal selection and approval speed), fairness (with respect to voter equality), robustness (resilience against attacks and collusion), scalability (ability to adjust storage/computation/communications according to the number of voters) & incentive schemes (whether the design motivates voter behavior).

The “ holographic consensus ” scheme took the topmost aggregate ratings with “ high ” marks in all but the “ robustness ” category.

Once the analysis was complete, the researchers set out to create “ a hypothetical voting operation for a purely decentralized and permissionless DAO governance. ” To accomplish this, they allowed the scheme to accelerate conviction voting with a “ holographic mechanism. ” Per the study:

“We know that the downside of the conviction voting mechanism is that it takes time to approve an urgent proposal. To address this concern, we introduce a blind betting mechanism: each member could choose whether to bet on any proposals with a certain number of their tokens.”

This system would permit stakeholders to bet tokens against an offer’s passing or veto, and depending on the outcome, the offer would moreover be accelerated or slowed — therefore potentially increasing the overall speed and robustness of DAO governance.

The crew’s offered scheme would similarly implement an incentive paradigm where those betting “ veto ” would sacrifice their tokens in the event consensus went to those voting “ transfer, ” and vice versa.

According to the researchers, this ensures that stakeholders will be incentivized to submit “ a good offer that's more likely to pass and get rewarded, ” therefore accelerating the processing of offers considered both urgent and good.

The researchers conclude by claiming their offered scheme trumps status quo efforts, but they do concede that it’s not without its own inherent problems:

“Our hypothetical scheme has a better design incorporating key features from other schemes. However, it is not flawless and might face challenges in implementation. Nevertheless, we aim to inspire innovative design thinking.”

(TRISTAN GREENE, Cointelegraph, 2023)