Conviction Voting

How it works

Proposals sit open with no deadline, each asking for an amount from a shared pool. Members stake tokens on the proposals they support and can move that stake whenever they like. Each proposal's conviction grows the longer stake stays on it, rising fast at first and then leveling off. Every proposal has a threshold that depends on how much of the pool it asks for: bigger requests need more conviction. When a proposal's conviction crosses its threshold, it passes and the funds are released. Moving stake away makes conviction decay at the same slow pace.

Use it when

• Fund many proposals from one pool continuously without scheduling votes.
• You want long-term members with steady preferences to outweigh last-minute swings.
• Let members signal priorities without forcing them to choose a single proposal.

Watch out for

• Slow by design: urgent proposals wait days or weeks to build enough conviction.
• Large holders can still dominate; time only slows them down, it does not stop them.

Example

1Hive. 1Hive launched conviction voting on xDai in 2020 to allocate Honey tokens from its common pool, based on a design by Commons Stack and BlockScience.

Related

• 9 ♦ Osmotic Funding
• 10 ♠ Vote Decay
• 4 ♥ Time-based Boost