Seeing quite some tweets flying around addressing the quadratic voting at Cardano Project Catalyst Fund14. Seems that many of these posts address questions which may find helpful answers & context at the Proposal from the Catalyst Team in Fund11 which has been completed and closed out in sept 2025, so just a month before this post. If we wonder how/why quadratic voting in Catalyst Fund14 now, its not coming by surprise
The Proposal: Alternative Catalyst voting schemes with new crypto protocols by IOG Research, Photrek, and the Catalyst Team
Personally i dont have a strong opinion of if its good/bad to introduce quadratic voting, to me its more important that we actually experiment in catalyst and therefore im glad to see this quadratic voting experiment taking place. Much safer to test & try at Catalyst than to do it directly at onchain governance where mistakes and errors would have much higher negative impact.
From the “Catalyst Weekly” messages I’d read in the month before the Fund 14 snapshot, I had understood that both linear voting and a fractional exponent were going to be measured in the vote — with the result determined linearly like before, but with the alternative also displayed — so administrators and proposers would be able to see how the results would have been if voting power were compressed.
So, perhaps like @HeptaSean — if I’d had known it would be the other way around, I would have registered a dozen of our dust wallets and low-ada project wallets for Catalyst voting.
I’m a bit flabbergasted that they all seem to think that this is a newly discovered loophole.
The possibility to trick such systems with sock puppet wallets was always discussed when quadratic voting or one wallet, one vote were proposed. Should have been very clear to everyone paying half attention that this is possible.
Very much depends on if the quadratic voting power decay will be employed at the level of the dRep or at the level of the individual delegators.
If I can create a lot of minimal ADA sock puppets, they get the maximum voting power per ADA, and I can then delegate them to a Catalyst dRep to only have to do the actual voting once, then that is pretty much a jackpot for gaming the system.
If the dRep gets reduced voting power per ADA the more ADA they have delegated to them, then that is not really possible. But then it also makes no sense at all to even start delegating. Voting for yourself then always has more voting power than putting it together with other delegators.
They really made an effort to not clearly state if it is used or not. Neither “solely at the tally stage” nor “without altering the existing vote casting process” tell me unambiguously if they actually use the quadratic voting results or just provide them informationally.
If it’s just an experiment without any real consequences for the Fund results at all, then I don’t understand why @Kriss_Baird feels the need to assure that there is “no evidence to support malicious behaviour” (which in itself is a bit questionable given the influx of seemingly automated small wallets others have found): https://xcancel.com/krissbaird/status/1973715126546252153#m
Also, if it is not used for the actual results this time, the value to assess if there would be malicious bevaviour if it actually would influence the real results is rather minimal.
For what it’s worth: Two and a half year old discussions about the possibility to game such a system with sock puppets (and the inability of “DID” shenanigans to counter that):
Yes, its indeed a bit confusing how/what was communicated. Tho very clear after all that in F14 quadratic voting is only applied to a test-tally, not counted into the final voting results. An actually quite nice & safe way to test & try before final implementation at Fund 15-16(?).
Also a bit unnecessary: They could have just reanalysed the votes from one or more of the previous funds.
And: If it is not actually relevant for the result, it doesn’t really test how many will try to game the system. (Seems like some already did it, anyway.)
An honest “test and try” should consider the possibility of not implementing it in the end if the test fails.
Gaslighting @Nicolas by claiming that he has left away “important context” while the quote literally says “Proposals are ranked by flat [emphasis mine] number of Yes votes […].” is just ridiculous.
“[…] introduces […] as a proof of concept applied exclusively at the tallying stage.”
Exclusively as opposed to what? As opposed to really using it for the results of the fund? Or to something else?
“GQV is a tallying method, not a way to assign voting power or credits.”
What is that supposed to mean? It obviously is a way to assign voting power to an ADA balance! What else should it be?
“[…] will be square-rooted before being tallied with the other square-rooted votes.”
No, they made that a parameter (for whatever reason) and votes are now cube-rooted, not square-rooted. (Still calling it “quadratic” voting then is kind of strange, but maybe someone didn’t know what “quadratic” means. )
“This phased approach preserves the existing vote-casting process […]”
Why should it not be preserved? Everything described up to this point does not require any changes to the vote-casting process.
Oh, wait, maybe the goal is the original quadratic voting idea where I have to distribute my voting weight instead of voting with the whole weight for all proposals that I choose? But that was not described anywhere, so it’s just confusing at this point.
And then “The goal is to assess GQV’s potential […]” makes very limited sense. Voting with having to distribute your voting weight is (again) a completely different system with its own (in my opinion prohibitively ugly) gotchas. And experiences with a system where full voting weight is just reduced by cube-rooting it are pretty worthless to say anything about it.
“For clarity, GQV will not be implemented in Fund14. Proposals are ranked by the flat number of Yes votes […]”
Even with the context above, how should that not be read as “We’re not actually using this.”?
The whole system described above is called “GQV” and this now says that exactly this GQV will not be implemented. So, it very much seems like an answer to the question what “proof of concept” above exactly means: “It is not used for the actual results, but only tallied as an experiment what the result would be.”
There’s no gaslighting @HeptaSean - I engaged in a good faith conversation to reverse engineer and understand where to make an adjustment in documentation for better clarity so it doesn’t trip anyone up. My expectations generally is the same in reverse. I don’t find these cherry picked personalization around malicious intent when there’s none - very useful. Can’t we just talk to one another without those bits and pieces? Would be nice.
Feedback noted and will be accounted for with the team.
@Felix_Weber - original post that explains what’s the Fund14 going to be like can be found here: Catalyst Weekly #124: Fund14 Voting Is Open! which was shared via all comms channels and including Voting App push at the start of the voting week.
TLDR - in Fund14 the adjusted tally is going to be used as outlined in the parameters document. Apologies for confusing you with materials in different places.
