Vote delegation

Vote delegation separates token ownership from the act of voting. It is implemented in ERC20Votes and ERC721Votes and standardized in ERC-5805, on voting with delegation. The critical point is that voting power activates only on delegation: a freshly received token has zero voting power until its owner calls delegate, to themselves or to a third party, which explains low participation when holders do not delegate. It uses per-timepoint checkpoints, so getPastVotes reads the delegated power at the proposal's snapshot and prevents double voting. The ERC-6372 standard sets the clock for those timepoints.

It is the mechanic that makes real DAOs work. It concentrates dispersed voting power in active, expert delegates, which raises effective participation and decision quality without forcing every holder to vote on every proposal. From this comes the role of the professional delegate, a figure of representation within governance.

Compound, with COMP, originated the delegate pattern, and Uniswap keeps public delegates with profiles on Tally, as does ENS through an active delegate program. Platforms such as Tally and Boardroom centralize delegate discovery. In the classic model delegation is all-or-nothing per address, though some implementations allow splitting the vote across several delegates.