Dao Voting Power Calculator

In token-weighted governance a voter's influence is simply the balance of governance tokens credited to their address, expressed as a share of total supply. Delegation makes the credited balance differ from the owned balance: holders can assign their voting weight to another address without transferring custody, so effective power equals own holdings plus delegations received. Two separate thresholds then gate what that power can do. The proposal threshold is the minimum weight needed to submit a proposal at all - Compound has used 25,000 COMP and Uniswap 0.25 percent of supply, roughly 2.5 million UNI. Quorum is the minimum total participation for a passing vote to count, commonly 2 to 10 percent of supply; Uniswap sets 4 percent, or about 40 million UNI. The practically important number is not your share of total supply but your share of votes actually cast. Governance turnout is usually in the low single digits, so a holder with 0.5 percent of supply can carry 10 percent or more of a real vote at 5 percent turnout - which is why the turnout scenarios matter more than the headline percentage. Two alternative weightings shown here behave very differently. Quadratic voting takes the square root of holdings, compressing a 10,000-to-1 token advantage into a 100-to-1 power advantage, but it is only meaningful with Sybil resistance, since splitting a balance across many wallets defeats it entirely. Conviction voting multiplies weight by staking duration, so power accrues toward a cap over weeks. The multipliers used here are illustrative; real implementations use a continuous exponential decay function with protocol-specific half-life parameters, not fixed step values.

On-chain corporate-style voting began badly. The DAO, launched in April 2016 as an Ethereum investment fund, raised over 12 million ETH and used token-weighted votes on funding proposals; a reentrancy exploit in June 2016 drained roughly 3.6 million ETH and triggered the hard fork that split Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. For several years afterwards protocol governance ran off-chain through forums and multisigs. The modern pattern was established by Compound, which distributed its COMP token in June 2020 and deployed Governor Alpha, a contract that combined an ERC-20 with checkpointed balances, explicit delegation, a proposal threshold, a voting period, and a timelock on execution. Governor Bravo followed in 2021 adding abstain votes and upgradeability. Because the code was permissively licensed, Uniswap adopted it for the UNI airdrop in September 2020 and dozens of protocols copied it; OpenZeppelin later generalised it into the reusable Governor and ERC20Votes contracts, making delegation and quorum standard vocabulary. Off-chain signalling matured in parallel with Snapshot, released in 2020, which records gas-free signed votes against a token balance snapshot. The alternatives have separate lineages: quadratic voting was formalised by economists E. Glen Weyl and Steven Lalley in the mid-2010s and popularised in crypto by Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, and Weyl in their 2018 quadratic funding work behind Gitcoin Grants, while conviction voting was developed by Michael Zargham and the Commons Stack around 2018 and first deployed by 1Hive and Aragon.