So, about 25 years ago, I had the following shower thought: What if all the money spent on political advertising went to the voters instead? What if we could just sell our votes?

- Voters who care could just vote normally
- Voters who don't care could get paid
- Voters who care a lot can actually spend money and have an outsized impact on outcomes.
- Speculators and arbitrageurs can make a profit helping price discovery.
- Political advertising goes away and there is much rejoicing.

One thing that struck me is that for the life of me I couldn't figure out how much a vote in a U.S. election would cost. Not even an order of magnitude. There is a real missing piece of information in modern democracy, namely, how much do people actually care about the outcome?

Of course, this isn't perfect. The main problem I can see is that we start out with a highly asymmetric playing field, in which it's dramatically easier for some players than others to buy influence. But this problem, while insurmountable for national elections, is easily surmountable for a variety of other scenarios (think corporate governance, HOA's and DAO's). And whereas these don't suffer from the scourge of political advertising, the price discovery mechanism and the option to express preference intensity still offers benefits.

The idea sat around in my head for a couple of decades. When smart contracts and DAO's appeared, it came back to my mind and I thought about implementing it, but I was busy and the learning curve was a pain, etc, etc. Then, when Claude code came out, this was the first project I built with it.

## What I've built

Well, I've built a DAO in which votes are saleable. The basic mechanism:

- Buy governance tokens from the DAO → Your payment goes to the treasury
- Token holders create proposals (textual resolutions, treasury transfers, token minting, governance token price changes)
- When a proposal gets enough support, an election triggers
- Each token holder receives voting tokens (1 for each governance token they hold)
- Voting tokens are tradeable on DEXs during the election
- To vote, send tokens to YES or NO addresses
- Majority wins (if quorum is met)

Key differentiator: Governance tokens are long term membership stakes. Voting tokens are tradeable influence on a *specific decision*.

The code is available at https://github.com/evronm/marketDAO and the fronend for the test-net (Polygon Amoy) deployment is available at https://evronm.github.io/marketDAO/index.html .

# Some Game Theory and a Fatal Flaw

Here's the obvious treasury raid attack:
- Buy new governance tokens adding up to more than the total in existence.
- Make a proposal to trasfer the entire treasury to yourself
- Vote "YES" with your vote tokens, which now add up to more than half.
- The treasury is yours (including the funds you spent on the governance tokens), and so is control of the DAO, at least until (unless) somebody buys more governance tokens.

This is a fundamental flaw, but there are potential solutions:
1. Disable token purchases after initial distribution
- Secondary market for governance tokens can still exist
- Tokens can still be minted by regular proposal/vote
- Can be implemented with software as is
2. Vesting period for new purchases
- In the event of a treasury raid, existing participants have ample time to mint more governance tokens
- Not implemented yet
3. Conviction voting hybrid
- Grant more voting tokens to older governance tokens
- Complicated
- Not implemented

Can anyone think of additional options? If not, I'll probably implement a configurable vesting period. I don't think I'll bother with the conviction voting thing unless there is real demand.

# Additional Questions

- What affects governance token price (remember, this is set at deploy time and changeable by vote)? Is it Treasury size? Number of participants?
- What affects vote price for different vote types? I'm particularly interested in the dynamics of governance token price changes, but treasury transfers and token mints should be interesting as well.
- What types of organizations is this kind of structure best suited to?
- Is there an optimal Gini coefficient for a structure like this?

# Why I'm Posting Here

- I've hit a wall theorizing. Most of my questions can probably only be answered empirically and I'm hoping some folks decide to play with it and get me some data.
- From what I've seen, this community has an interest in mechanism design. If there are obvious failure modes I'm missing, someone will spot them right away.
- This mechanism raises a lot of interesting questions. Even if the final verdict is "there is no real world use for this thing," I think the academic exercise of price discovery can net someone a paper or two (I lack the academic credentials to go this route).

So please, try it, break it, or tell me why it's doomed. I'd be happy to do custom deployments if anybody wants that.