A Scalable Voting System: Validation of Holographic Consensus in DAOstack

Abstract

Blockchain technology allows for new forms of online governance relying on decentralized infrastructure. In particular, it has enabled the so called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): pieces of software deployed on a blockchain which mediate the interaction of groups of people. Allegedly, their main aim is to facilitate large-scale decentralized cooperation in online communities. In order to do that, they provide governance mechanisms for democratic decision-making in communities. One of them is ”Holographic Consensus”, a voting mechanism intended to filter relevant proposals for large communities. To which extent is Holographic Consensus working as intended, facilitating effective scalable cooperation? In order to validate this method, we analyze the 22 DAO communities and 6000 users from the DAOstack platform, which uses Holographic Consensus in all its DAOs. Our results show that this mechanisms seems to follow the expected behavior, facilitating scalable decision-making in large DAOs.