RQ1
Participation Dynamics
How do we get more people to vote consistently?
Governance stalls when quorum targets exceed real turnout capacity. In the core sweep, turnout stayed near 22-23%, but quorum reach collapsed once quorum moved past ~10-15%.
- At 5% quorum, 99.9% of proposals reached quorum. At 20%, only 25.4% reached quorum. At 40%+, quorum reach fell to 0%.
- Pass rate among proposals that did reach quorum stayed high (97.6-98.5%), showing the bottleneck was threshold reach, not voter disagreement.
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Governance Capture Mitigation
How do we reduce whale control without freezing the DAO?
Capture resistance improved most when power-distribution rules changed directly, not when only rate limits were added.
- A quadratic threshold of 250 cut whale influence from 0.449 to 0.256, a 43% reduction.
- Capture risk dropped from 0.464 to 0.269 in strong mitigation settings, a 42% reduction.
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Proposal Pipeline Effects
How do we make proposals move faster without lowering quality?
Proposal flow improves with moderate filtering and selective fast-tracking. Extreme settings are where quality or speed starts to break.
- In Experiment 05, raising temp-check pressure from 0.05 to 0.50 lifted pass rate from 96.4% to 98.5%.
- Fast-track with a 12-step minimum kept quorum reach above 99% while accelerating obvious-consensus proposals.
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Treasury Resilience
How do we protect treasury health through volatility?
Treasury resilience came from explicit policy discipline: stabilization, reserve buffers, spending limits, and clear emergency triggers.
- Stabilization reduced treasury volatility by about 50%: from roughly 0.448-0.500 down to 0.235-0.271.
- Reserve buffers and spending caps improved downside protection; stabilized runs landed around $10,048-$13,147 final treasury in tested settings.
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Inter-DAO Cooperation
What kinds of cross-DAO coordination actually work?
Cross-DAO coordination worked, but it was fragile. Outcomes improved when fairness, structure, and partner complementarity were designed upfront.
- Inter-DAO success rate was 21.4-23.4% across cooperation topologies versus 0% in isolated mode.
- Specialized topology generated more inter-DAO activity (75.8 vs 50.3 proposals) and higher ecosystem treasury ($26,107 vs $24,071).
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LLM Agent Reasoning
Where do LLMs help governance, and where do they add risk?
LLM-enabled governance showed an engagement-latency tradeoff. Hybrid mode was the strongest default in the current benchmark.
- Hybrid and all-LLM both reached 0.50 pass rate, while the rule-based baseline was 0.00 in this short-horizon setup.
- All-LLM posted higher participation and consistency (0.3115 participation, 0.7474 consistency) than hybrid (0.1863, 0.6625).
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