token-weighted voting

Token-weighted voting is the default rule of nearly every DAO: one token, one vote. Your influence over a decision is directly proportional to how many governance tokens you hold or control. It is simple to implement, hard to fake (you cannot cheaply manufacture tokens), and it ties decision power to economic stake — the people with the most to lose get the most say. Most major DeFi protocols, including Uniswap, Compound, and Aave, govern this way.

Mechanically, a vote reads each address's token balance at a fixed snapshot block and counts that balance as voting weight. Tokens are usually 'voting-enabled' versions (such as OpenZeppelin's ERC20Votes), which record historical checkpoints so the system can ask 'how many tokens did this address hold at block N?' without trusting the present balance. Reading a past snapshot is what makes the scheme resistant to flash loans and last-second accumulation: borrowing a million tokens after the snapshot block buys you nothing.

The central critique is plutocracy. One-token-one-vote is, by construction, one-dollar-one-vote: it amplifies whales, early investors, and exchanges that custody other people's tokens, and it offers no way to express how strongly anyone cares — a holder with 51% can override everyone else regardless of intensity or expertise. It also makes vote-buying and bribery markets straightforward, since voting power is a liquid, transferable asset. Alternatives like quadratic voting, conviction voting, and delegation all exist precisely to soften these failure modes, but each trades the brutal simplicity of token weighting for new attack surfaces (notably the need for Sybil resistance).