Voting with time commitment for decentralized governance: Bond voting as a Sybil-resistant mechanism

With Vijay Mohan and Peyman Khezr. Available at SSRN

Abstract: Blockchain applications are increasingly experimenting with novel governance mechanisms that address issues that are important for their community: resistance to voter fraud in the form a Sybil attack; resistance to the formation of a plutocracy within the community; and, the ability to express preference intensity. In this paper, we take a closer look at these issues confronting decentralized governance. Our contribution is three-fold: first, we lay some analytical foundations for the formal modelling of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a voting system to be resistant to a Sybil attack; second, we show that a voting mechanism with a single instrument for expressing preference intensity, such as the quantity of tokens, cannot simultaneously achieve resistance to both Sybil attacks and plutocracy formation; and third, we design a voting mechanism, bond voting, that is Sybil resistant and offers a second instrument of voting influence (time commitment) for plutocracy resistance.

Setting the reserve price for the Tracer DAO Gnosis auction

With Peyman Khezr

Introduction: Selling multiple units of a homogeneous good in an auction is one way of determining the market price. Uniform-price auctions have been used in many real-world markets because of their price discovery property: All winning bidders pay the same price (either highest losing bid or lowest winning bid). The question is how a seller could compute an optimal reserve price in a uniform price auction. First we should note that literature suggests a positive reserve price is usually better than no reserve price as it reduces the chance of underbidding by bidders. However, to compute the reserve price for a uniform price auction there are no clear criteria. In this note we follow the criteria given for the second-price auction as the best approximate of the uniform-price auction.

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