Perils of current DAO governance

Abstract

DAO Governance is currently broken. We survey the state of the art and find worrying conclusions. Vote buying, vote selling and coercion are easy. The wealthy rule, decentralisation is a myth. Hostile take-overs are incentivised. Ballot secrecy is non-existent or short lived, despite being a human right. Verifiablity is achieved at the expense of privacy. These privacy concerns are highlighted with case study analyses of Vocdoni's governance protocol. This work presents two contributions: firstly a review of current DAO governance protocols, and secondly, an illustration of their vulnerabilities, showcasing the privacy and security threats these entail.