Quadratic voting

In quadratic voting, each participant holds a fixed budget of voice credits and the cost of casting n votes on one option is n squared: 1 vote costs 1 credit, 2 votes cost 4, 3 votes cost 9. The effective number of votes is the square root of credits spent. So a voter chooses not only a direction but signals how much each issue matters. The unavoidable piece is Sybil resistance. Without a verified unique identity, an actor spins up several accounts and breaks the quadratic property, so pure quadratic voting requires proof of personhood or KYC.

It captures the intensity of preference, something neither "one person, one vote" nor "one token, one vote" achieves. It reduces the dominance of indifferent majorities over highly affected minorities and dilutes plutocratic concentration of power. It was formalized by E. Glen Weyl and Steven Lalley and popularized in the book Radical Markets (2018). Its funding variant, Quadratic Funding, was proposed by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and Weyl in 2018.