DAO Treasury Governance Lab
Who should control a shared treasury?
Explore how token-weighted voting (TWV) and square-root voting (SRV) change collective choice when one holder owns 60% of the tokens—and what happens when identity splitting becomes strategically available.
Step 1 · Understand
One treasury, three proposals, unequal token holdings.
You are one of seven ordinary holders. Together the seven ordinary holders own 40% of the tokens; one whale owns the remaining 60%. Each actor votes for one proposal.
A 60% holder receives voting weight 0.600. Each ordinary holder receives about 0.057.
With one whale wallet, the whale receives about 0.775 while each ordinary holder receives about 0.239.
Step 2 · Vote
Round 1
Choose a proposal after seeing your own values and projected support from the other seven actors.
Your private values
Higher is better for you. Your highest-value proposal is the sincere-voting benchmark.
| Proposal | Value |
|---|
Projected support before your vote
The other six ordinary holders split evenly between A and B; the whale supports C.
Step 3 · Compare
Same treasury. Same actors. Different aggregation rules.
The behavioral task holds the scenario fixed and changes the governance rule. Your votes may also change because the strategic environment changes.
Verified synthetic benchmark
What the separate simulation found at 60% whale ownership.
These are means from 1,000 paired synthetic valuation profiles per condition (independent uniform [0, 1), seed 206). They are computational evidence, not human-participant results.
| Rule | Whale wallets | Holder efficiency | Stake efficiency | Whale success | Non-whale representation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TWV | 1 | 0.899065 | 0.991097 | 1.000 | 0.321 |
| SRV | 1 | 0.927781 | 0.977076 | 0.896 | 0.417 |
| SRV | 8 | 0.899065 | 0.991097 | 1.000 | 0.321 |
Interpretation: unsplit SRV raises equal-holder efficiency and non-whale representation in this simulation, while slightly lowering stake-weighted efficiency. With 8 whale-controlled wallets, those gains disappear and the displayed metrics match TWV. “Non-whale representation” here means the winning proposal maximizes the seven ordinary holders’ aggregate synthetic valuation; it is not a protected-minority measure or proof of real-world DAO capture.
Allocation analogy boundary
This is a collective allocation problem, not a literal auction.
The scarce resource is DAO treasury funding and the proposals are competing uses of that resource. Token holdings shape decision power, but this behavioral demo has no monetary bids or payments. The project’s auction/allocation comparison should therefore be interpreted as a related allocation lens rather than as an identity between voting and auctions.
Step 4 · Reflect
What explains your choices?
This stage distinguishes the rational benchmark from possible behavioral mechanisms such as fairness preferences, strategic voting, and bounded attention to Sybil incentives.