L09: Voting Systems
Explore real DAO governance in action — browse proposals, analyze voter participation, and understand different voting mechanisms.
Guided Activities
- Go to snapshot.org.
- Search for "Uniswap" in the search bar and click on the Uniswap governance space.
- Browse the list of proposals. Click on one that has status "Closed" (already voted on).
- Examine: the voting options, total votes cast, number of unique voters, and the final outcome.
- Look at the "Votes" tab — can you identify any "whale" voters who had a disproportionate influence?
Reflection question: What percentage of UNI token holders actually participated in this vote? Is low voter turnout a problem for DAO governance?
- Go to tally.xyz.
- Click on "Uniswap" or "Compound" governance page.
- Find: total proposals submitted, currently active proposals, total unique voters, and total delegated voting power.
- Click on a completed proposal and examine the vote breakdown (For vs Against vs Abstain).
- Compare: Tally shows on-chain governance (votes are Ethereum transactions) vs Snapshot (off-chain, gasless voting).
Reflection question: Why do some DAOs use off-chain voting (Snapshot) while others use on-chain voting (Tally)? What are the tradeoffs of each approach?
- Go to deepdao.io.
- Note the dashboard stats: total DAOs tracked, total treasury value across all DAOs, and total governance participants.
- Sort DAOs by treasury size — which organizations have the most money under DAO governance?
- Look at the average voter participation rate across DAOs. Is it high or low?
- Click on any major DAO — examine its governance structure, number of proposals, and participation trends over time.
Reflection question: Is low voter participation a fundamental problem for DAOs? How could participation be improved while maintaining decentralization?
- Go back to Snapshot and find a proposal where voting results are visible.
- Look at the votes tab and find a "whale" address that cast a very large vote (e.g., 1,000,000+ tokens).
- In standard token-weighted voting, 1 token = 1 vote. So 1,000,000 tokens = 1,000,000 votes.
- In quadratic voting, the cost of votes increases quadratically: 1,000,000 tokens would give only √1,000,000 = 1,000 votes.
- Calculate: how would the outcome of this proposal change if quadratic voting had been used?
Reflection question: What are the tradeoffs between token-weighted voting and quadratic voting? How does each mechanism handle the tension between "one person, one vote" and "skin in the game"?