DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs

The authors propose Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE), a metric that formalizes a broader notion of decentralization in DAO proposal voting by measuring the similarity of participants' utility functions across a set of proposals. Using VBE, they prove results about the decentralizing effects of vote delegation, proposal bundling, bribery, and quadratic voting, and they offer practical suggestions for improving DAO decentralization. The paper also warns of systemic bribery risk as DAOs decentralize. To show this threat is realistic, the authors present the first practical Dark DAO prototype, which uses trusted execution environments on the Oasis Sapphire blockchain to attack Ethereum DAOs.