GDAO Leveling the Voting Landscape

GDAO Leveling the Voting Landscape with Their Proof of Existence Vision

Navigating the crypto realm can feel overwhelming at times. There’s so much to learn and countless avenues of information that are all parts of this constantly developing technology. One unique aspect of the crypto space is how numerous projects aim to listen to the will of their investors. Community driven projects typically develop in a direction that is voted upon by the token holders of the project. Sort of similar to how a nation might attempt to represent the will of the people. However as we all know, between the time when the people cast their votes to the stroke of the politician’s pen there is often much lost in translation. Unlike a typical representative system, most structured community driven crypto projects have a voting apparatus in place that allows both the big time investors and everyday average crypto-joe token holders to make their suggestions for improvement or the project’s direction known to the development team.

In a community driven project, the importance of the community member is paramount. However, a caveat of the anonymity designed within blockchain technology is how a single person can create multiple different anonymous wallets. If each separate wallet owned by one individual held the token in question, then it would look as though there are multiple different token holders, aka voters, even though they’re all owned by the same person. Users taking on numerous wallets/personas to gain an unfair, potentially malicious advantage over other holders is known as a ‘sybil attack’.

A common default strategy utilized for voting is weight-based voting mechanics: ie, the more tokens you hold, the bigger your vote/weight/voice. However, unless the source of a vote can be isolated and verified to one individual with one wallet, democratic or egalitarian governance procedures will be vulnerable to sybil attacks. Furthermore, without a fair voting mechanism, large token holders could direct the project in any direction, abusing their power and dominating all proposals they feel is not in their personal best interest.

Governor DAO, in collaboration with Finnovant, has implemented a biometric Proof of Existence (PoE) token early in 2021 which solves the challenge in question. This solution provides the opportunity for anyone with a digital wallet currently on ETH mainnet to enroll in a biometric vetting process. Essentially, the voice and face is mapped to the connected wallet through the dApp (decentralized app) verifying the biometric hash isn’t already mapped to an existing wallet. If a person attempts to enroll a 2nd wallet their biometrics will be detected as enrolled therefore throwing an error. The process can justify that any given wallet is owned by a particular individual, meaning two or more wallets will now be unable to act as a single entity through the GDAO ecosystem. PoE (Proof of Existence) is a universal defense against Sybil Attacks. This massive benefit to any community driven crypto project is the ease in integration, only needing developers to add one line of code to their project which will verify the on-chain ERC20 PoE token ownership.

The use of PoE is more than just initial voter verification. PoE could be queried AFTER a vote has concluded to show the percentage of votes that are verified authentic. PoE subtypes could also be used to demarcate developer or team-member/influencer votes so that they are considered differently. In fact, a member of a community does not even need to be a holder of the token. In a situation where any member, regardless of investment, is participating in a vote, the number of votes submitted by each individual can still be verified.

Gone are the days where a huge token holder, or the development team, can swing their weight around to unfairly sway a proposal. Furthermore, by leveling the playing field Governor DAO aims to increase engagement across all community members within a project. Studies show that once someone knows each vote carries the same power, they will be more inclined to be involved with the development of a project. Since GDAO’s Proof of Existence technology continues to hold the user anonymous, yet marked as an individual - the outcome is a perfect solution for DAOs and projects looking to maximize voting to build out the future of their platform.

If you are a project looking to integrate PoE into your voting strategy, contact us.