What is Quadratic Voting?
Crypto Glossary Definition
A specific voting process, and a proposed method of governing a blockchain. Voters are able to express how strongly they feel about an issue by purchasing more votes for a specific outcome. While voters can vote as many times as they want, the cost of each vote increases exponentially.
Why Quadratic Voting Matters
Because each additional vote costs quadratically more than the last, quadratic voting is designed to prevent a single large token holder from simply buying overwhelming voting power — it lets people express intensity of preference, but makes total dominance by one wallet mathematically expensive, an attempt to make on-chain governance less plutocratic than simple one-token-one-vote systems.
Quadratic Voting in Practice
Imagine a DAO governing a mid-sized DeFi lending protocol puts forward a proposal to raise the collateral ratio on a risky asset. Under a simple one-token-one-vote system, a single venture fund holding twelve percent of the governance token could single-handedly swing the outcome. Instead, the DAO uses quadratic voting: each member is allotted a budget of voting credits, and casting additional votes on the same proposal costs the square of the number of votes purchased — one vote costs one credit, two votes cost four credits, three votes cost nine, and so on. A small retail holder who feels strongly about the proposal can spend all their credits on a handful of votes, while the venture fund, despite holding vastly more tokens, finds that buying overwhelming influence becomes prohibitively expensive well before it can dominate the outcome. The result is a tally that reflects how many distinct participants care and how intensely, rather than simply how much capital one wallet controls. Some governance platforms have experimented with quadratic funding, a close cousin of this mechanism, to allocate community grants more democratically. Critics note it's still vulnerable to Sybil attacks — someone splitting tokens across many wallets to fake broad support — which is why most implementations pair it with identity verification.
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