failure family

governance participation collapse

50 claims across 32 works.

• unaddressed-agency-problems: Existing proposals for implementing contingent capital do not explain how they would address the information asymmetries and principal and agent probl
• reciprocal-voting-passivity: Where institutions hold each other's contingent capital and share similar risk profiles, they will be hesitant after conversion to vote for necessary
• Exit only control, delayed by listing: The only real control power available to token holders is the decision to hold or sell their tokens, and even that exit right may be unavailable until
• incumbent-bench-closure: If the bench institutes protocols for rejecting applicants through the validation pool, it gains both the incentive and the opportunity to block all n
• Talent flight from hierarchy: Centralized organizations also lose the competition for talent, because the younger generation views centralization as a threat to personal autonomy,
• forking-as-governance: Forking a chain is an insufficient governance mechanism, and even attempts to create socially optimal chain forking rules cannot suffice as a substitu
• hard-forking-insufficiency: Blockchain-based corporate governance solutions in DAOs require evolutionary blockchain governance protocols, and socially optimal hard-forking rules
• majority discrimination against unrepresented minorities: Majority rule in a microdemocracy can produce discrimination, because a majority that is itself unaffected by a rule it enacts can impose a disproport
• loss of miner checks: Kaal accepts that the arguments against on chain governance remain strong: in an off chain model miners supply checks and balances over protocol chang
• duverger-polarization: Plurality voting predictably produces a system that swings between two polarized parties who are less acceptable to the majority but strongly preferre
• missing-governance-framework: Bitcoin and Ethereum have no formal binding governance framework declaring how consensus protocols may be changed in the future, which the authors ide
• Democratic Legitimacy Deficit of Code: As code proliferates as law, the democratic legitimacy of coded legal arrangements is increasingly called into question, because private actors have a
• no perfect governance: Every governance process ever implemented is flawed, and no perfect governance system is possible even under very minimal assumptions such as non dict
• majority lock in: Fundamental rule changes in a large decentralized organization are typically demanded when a large minority is treated unfairly, which means the advan
• clone disruption: Because no major peer to peer organization has anything resembling effective decentralized governance, none of them are viable in the long term and al
• Unfixed protocol governance: Ethereum will not be efficient until it operates inside a robust decentralized economy, and it will not last at all unless its governance is fixed.
• governance design failure beneath a technical bug: The re entrancy programming bug was not the 2016 DAO's most serious problem; the system would eventually have failed more spectacularly because it was
• missing decentralized governance: New DAO proposals appear almost quarterly in the 2020s and most fail because of a lack of decentralized governance solutions.
• ineffective patch size remedies: Proposed remedies for patch size, namely distributing the workload across a broader set of reviewers and providing better transparency on developer re
• insufficient developer participation: Failing to maximize developer participation and communication negatively affects the code review process and creates unnecessary costs on software dev
• first reviewer anchoring in hierarchical review: In hierarchical legacy review processes the first reviewer's output gets the highest priority and follow on reviewers add only minor upgrades, so the
• hierarchy blocks clarifying review: Increasing the number of reviewers who ask clarifying questions makes code simpler and clearer and thereby typically increases code quality, but hiera
• exclusion of edge reviewers: The hierarchical approach to code reviews undermines long term participation and opinion from the edges of the reviewer spectrum, because those review
• Liveness fault from participant inaction: The design decreases the likelihood of individual and, in turn, community liveness fault, because non use of existing reputation at the individual lev
• Corruption of delegated voting: Delegating one's vote to a third party whose ethics and belief system the voter does not truly know produces suboptimal outcomes, and delegated voting
• attrition after reward status disclosure: Publishing each validator's uptime and rewarding status to the community on a weekly basis coincided with active Casper testnet nodes falling below 80
• hierarchy-blocks-talent-discovery: A hierarchy obstructs solving novel problems because it prevents the identification of talented people at the lower rungs and resists the changes need
• Homogeneity Suppresses Decentralization Benefits: In phase 1 the benefits of decentralization remain relatively small because the presumably homogenous DAOIC member group generates little dissent in r
• idiocy-of-the-mob: Condorcet's Jury Theorem cuts both ways: larger groups of slightly stupid people, defined as being wrong slightly more than half the time, are worse t
• Egalitarian voting expertise deficit: One-person-one-vote governance fails on technical questions because half the members have less than average expertise yet equal power, which incentivi
• DAO washing and robo voting decay: Poorly executed DAOs exhibit a recognizable cluster of pathologies, including siphoned coins, distracted and robo voters, centralization, DAO washing
• Hype dissipation of fundraiser DAOs: Fundraiser DAOs are structurally fragile because they typically lack incentives for meaningful community engagement, so they dissipate once the hype t
• Silent majority voting deficit: Dispersed, passive token holders cannot defend a DAO: because power in Build Finance DAO was not decentralized, the silent majority of token holders l
• Quota and participation requirements in work-to-earn: Work-to-earn DAOs must leave it entirely to each member how much time they contribute; DAOs that impose quotas and participation requirements may not
• weak-dao-governance: Governance scores across the studied DAOs average 3.81 out of 10, with only a couple of DAOs scoring 7 or higher and the vast majority scoring 5 or le
• platform-risk-exceeds-mitigation: Some DAO governance platforms create more risk than they mitigate, and DAOs that are not well governed are doomed to fail.
• regulatory-exposure-from-weak-governance: DAOs without effective governance structures and policies risk violating local laws and regulations, exposing themselves to legal and regulatory conse
• majority-tyranny: One person one vote governance carries the risk of majority tyranny, in which the majority imposes its will on minority groups, and it is unsuited to
• quadratic-voting-manipulation: Quadratic voting remains open to manipulation and strategic voting, and it depends on a robust and transparent voting system to count votes accurately
• expert panel narrowness: The hybrid model falls short of full community co-governance because it relies on a select group of experts for data validation and therefore may not
• Exclusion of edge reviewers: Hierarchical code review undermines long-term participation by reviewers at the edges of the reviewer spectrum, because those reviewers either have no
• majority tyranny under equal voting: One-person-one-vote in DAOs equalizes voting power across participants regardless of financial stake, but it creates the risk of majority tyranny.
• poor governance risk cluster: Poorly governed DAOs face significant risks of centralization, lack of transparency, and inefficiency, so effective governance structures are a precon
• absent work to earn channel: A DAO that offers no paid work opportunities for participants stifles engagement, as scored for Hop DAO with a Work to Earn score of 1.
• no dedicated deliberation platform: The absence of a dedicated discussion platform, combined with poor engagement on third party accounts, hinders meaningful discussion and collaboration
• Governance latency in traditional models: Traditional governance models lack the real time responsiveness to community sentiment that a decentralized WDAG system supplies, and this latency, no
• automation-democratic-deficit: Automatic adjustment mechanisms trade democratic input for responsiveness: by removing policy changes from the legislative agenda they limit opportuni
• insufficiency-of-existing-dao-paradigms: The published UDLC Codex deliberately left its DAO governance architecture unspecified because no existing decentralized governance paradigm could sim
• quality-efficiency-paradox: Selecting a single agent per job by weighted random draw sacrifices quality assurance for efficiency, reflecting a broader pattern in DAO governance w
• quality-efficiency-paradox: Selecting one agent per job by weighted random selection appears efficient but is mathematically suboptimal for quality assurance, since expected qual