🤖 AI Summary
DLT governance mechanisms suffer from systemic flaws—including coercion, vote-buying, power centralization, and protocol abuse—that fundamentally undermine fairness and decentralization. To address these issues, this work introduces the first governance taxonomy for DLTs, integrating cryptography, social choice theory, and e-voting frameworks; it identifies six fundamental vulnerability classes and formalizes twelve essential governance properties. Building upon this taxonomy, we propose a novel antifragile governance design paradigm that is amenable to formal verification while ensuring both technical feasibility and institutional legitimacy. Furthermore, we establish the first multidimensional benchmark for evaluating DLT governance—enabling rigorous, comparative assessment across transparency, enforceability, and public-interest alignment. Collectively, this research provides both theoretical foundations and actionable design principles for building robust, accountable, and decentralized on-chain governance systems.
📝 Abstract
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) promise decentralization, transparency, and security, yet the reality often falls short due to fundamental governance flaws. Poorly designed governance frameworks leave these systems vulnerable to coercion, vote-buying, centralization of power, and malicious protocol exploits: threats that undermine the very principles of fairness and equity these technologies seek to uphold. This paper surveys the state of DLT governance, identifies critical vulnerabilities, and highlights the absence of universally accepted best practices for good governance. By bridging insights from cryptography, social choice theory, and e-voting systems, we not only present a comprehensive taxonomy of governance properties essential for safeguarding DLTs but also point to technical solutions that can deliver these properties in practice. This work underscores the urgent need for robust, transparent, and enforceable governance mechanisms. Ensuring good governance is not merely a technical necessity but a societal imperative to protect the public interest, maintain trust, and realize the transformative potential of DLTs for social good.