Concave is the New Linear: The Impossibility of Anti-Plutocratic DAO Governance

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) often use concave voting mechanisms to balance the influence of large token holders with community input, but these systems are vulnerable to Sybil attacks, where attackers create multiple identities to gain disproportionate voting power. Research demonstrates that such attacks can transform intended concave voting functions, like Quadratic Voting, into a one-token-one-vote system, undermining the decentralization goals of DAOs. Despite the attempt to equalize voting through concave mechanisms, attackers can split tokens into numerous small wallets to maximize their influence, bypassing the intended dampening effect and threatening governance integrity. While transaction and voting costs can mitigate some risks, the study highlights that systems relying solely on wallet size are inherently plutocratic, as attackers can always achieve at least linear voting power relative to their holdings. The text calls for the development of new strategies, such as token time-locks and proof-of-personhood, to safeguard DAOs from these vulnerabilities, urging designers to carefully evaluate voting systems to prevent the exploitation of their networks.