Voting power

Voting power is the parent concept of on-chain governance: it defines how much each address weighs when deciding. Three models dominate its assignment. Proportional to token balance (one token, one vote). Proportional to tokens and lock time (vote-escrow or veTokens). And non-linear (quadratic), uncommon on-chain due to the Sybil problem. Under the OpenZeppelin ERC20Votes standard or Compound, power does not exist until the holder calls delegate, to themselves or a third party. Only delegated power recorded in checkpoints counts in a proposal.

It determines who controls critical decisions: protocol parameters, treasury spending, contract upgrades. Its design defines whether a DAO is plutocratic, whether it rewards long-term commitment and how resistant it is to manipulation. Concentrated or "rentable" power on the market opens the door to a governance attack. That is why progressive decentralization largely consists of redistributing voting power from the founding team to the community.

Compound and Uniswap assign power proportional to delegated tokens, queried via checkpoints. Curve introduced the vote-escrow model with veCRV: power depends on the locked CRV and the lock time, capped at four years, with a balance that decays linearly toward unlock. One CRV locked four years gives one veCRV; locked one year, 0.25 veCRV. That design sparked the so-called Curve Wars, where protocols like Convex accumulated veCRV to direct emissions.