DAOs需要进行情绪检查

2024年7月28日，Compound社区通过了提案289，授权了一群五名代币持有者从CompoundDAO的资金库中窃取了约2400万美元。当然，社区并不打算授权一场大抢劫。而提出提案289的“黄金男孩”们，可能也不是在策划一场。提案289旨在将DAO资金库的5%分配给黄金男孩们在其收益产生的金库中全面控制。许多人反对黄金男孩们的提案，认为这是“治理攻击”的典型例子，即操纵DAO的治理机制，目的是耗尽其资金库或巩固控制权。

无论黄金男孩们的意图如何，Compound是如何出现这种危险的呢？Compound是去中心化代币投票的先驱之一，其拥有17的中本聪系数，使其比许多权益证明网络更加去中心化。然而，黄金男孩们的利用暴露了CompoundDAO的选民冷漠。黄金男孩们得以通过提案289，仅占总COMP供应量的不到7%。这是因为许多代币持有者选择不投票 —— 平均而言，仅有51名Compound的近5000名成员在链上提案上投票。但这并未反映在现有的去中心化指标和概念中。这是一个大问题。

如今，流行的去中心化指标，如中本聪系数或基尼系数，都是以代币为中心的。它们关注的是地址上的代币分布。

考虑两个假设的DAO，鲸鱼DAO和小鱼DAO。鲸鱼DAO的代币均匀分布在5个钱包中。而小鱼DAO的代币均匀分布在100个钱包中。

乍一看，我们可能会认为小鱼DAO比鲸鱼DAO更加去中心化。然而，这个结论并未考虑首先控制这些钱包的是谁。例如，假设在小鱼DAO中，70个钱包是由一个鲸鱼拥有，即同一个人或团体。那么小鱼DAO实际上比鲸鱼DAO更加集中化，因为一个人控制了70%的投票权。

这正是黄金男孩们的情况。该组的“赞成”票约为70万COMP，分散在数十个钱包中，其中许多个体钱包持有的COMP少于25k。现有的以代币为中心的去中心化指标，如中本聪系数，会让我们错误地得出这个投票是去中心化的结论，因为“赞成”票分散在多个地址上。

Token-centric metrics miss other forms of centralization too. What if 80% of voters in a DAO have been bribed to vote for a proposal? Bribery doesn’t affect token holdings, so a token-centric metric won’t capture it. The same is true for groupthink, collusion, and other ways in which control of a DAO’s governance may fall to a single or small number of groups.

To measure decentralization in a way that matches meaningful notions of the robustness of a DAO’s governance, there’s a crying need for a new metric.

To better understand the true degree of decentralization in a DAO, we propose a new family of metrics called Voting Bloc Entropy or VBE (pronounced “vibe”) for short. As the name suggests, VBE does not just measure token holdings in individual wallet addresses. It takes into account clusters of token holders that are exhibiting similar voting patterns. We call such a cluster a “voting bloc,” by analogy to voting blocs in political systems. Voting blocs may be loose coalitions or they may be self-identifying groups of individuals like the Golden Boys. VBE measures whether there are large, dominant voting blocs — what we regard as the key form of centralization in DAO governance.

In the case of the Golden Boys, a VBE metric would treat all the attackers’ votes as a single voting bloc, regardless of how many wallets they split their tokens into. It would also treat all of the non-participating voters in CompoundDAO as a bloc, since they too exhibit aligned behavior. Those voters, the majority by voting weight, would constitute a single, massive bloc that we call an “inactivity whale.” That huge bloc which the Golden Boys exploited — would imply low VBE and thus poor decentralization in Compound.

One of the most important benefits of a good decentralization metric is that it leads to useful, actionable guidance about how to reinforce decentralization. Our recent research enumerates a number of key lessons that VBE offers on DAO decentralization. For example, you might expect delegation to increase centralization by concentrating voting power. Surprisingly, our results show that when a DAO has a big inactivity whale, delegation can shrink the whale and lead to higher VBE, i.e., higher decentralization.

To illuminate the state of decentralization across the DAO landscape, we’ve created a new resource for the community: The IC3 VBE dashboard, which offers ways to compare VBE across DAOs (although some caution is warranted in cross-DAO comparisons) and enables DAOs to monitor fluctuations in VBE over time. As a proxy for the “health” of a DAO, VBE can help DAO operators guide governance practices.

我们也相信我们的研究可以指导DAO的委托过程。例如，通过将代表者聚类成类似政党的投票集团，VBE为代币持有者提供了一种简单识别代表者（可能创建AI代理）以代表他们的利益，从而减少DAO中的选民冷漠。

有了诸如VBE之类的工具，DAO可以更好地避免利用DAO选民冷漠的治理攻击，就像最近的Compound案例一样。然而，除了这个目标之外，通过衡量并寻求优化他们的VBE，DAO可以实现更好的治理，利用投票社区中的多样观点，并促进健康的辩论。虽然我们的研究仍在进行中，但我们已经让主要的DAO和利益相关者参与实施、测试和迭代一个开源库，以支持仪表板和VBE的其他应用。

就像在许多其他去中心化系统中一样，DAO中的“D”可能是最难正确把握的字母。但也许良好的“vibe”可以帮助。

注：本专栏中表达的观点属于作者个人观点，不一定代表CoinDesk，Inc.或其所有者和关联公司的观点。