Square-root (quadratic) voting

How it works

Square-root voting scales influence by the square root of stake instead of in direct proportion. Under standard token weighting, 100 times the tokens means 100 times the votes. Under square-root weighting, the same holder gets 10 times the votes. Large holders keep a real advantage, but the marginal return on accumulating more tokens as a governance instrument falls sharply.

Quadratic voting extends the logic. Each participant gets a budget of voice credits, and each additional vote on one proposal costs quadratically more: one vote costs one credit, two cost four, three cost nine. A holder who cares intensely about one issue can stack influence there, but only by depleting their budget for everything else, which reveals the genuine intensity of preferences.

Why it matters

Both mechanisms target the same root problem. Under pure token weighting, the optimal play for any large holder is to vote full weight on every proposal regardless of how much they care. That destroys the information content of governance and reduces it to laundering the biggest holder's preferences through a voting formality.

Common mistake

The shared vulnerability is the Sybil attack. A whale who splits a position across hundreds of wallets recovers linear-or-better weight, because the sum of many small square roots exceeds the square root of the consolidated position. Robust quadratic voting needs proof-of-personhood or verified unique identity. Gitcoin Grants runs one of the most studied quadratic funding deployments, and the Sybil problem there is documented and live.

We weigh both mechanisms against alignment benefit, implementation complexity, the availability of a Sybil-resistance layer, and the UX burden of a credit-based system. Square-root weighting without Sybil resistance is a partial measure. Quadratic voting without identity is something sophisticated actors will route around.