Flexible Voting Gitcoin Grant Description

Flexible Voting is an extension to the widely used Governor system pioneered by Compound and used by many DAOs. It allows arbitrary delegate voting contracts to roll up the votes of many token holders. This provides a permissionless interface for all kinds of new use cases related to onchain DAO voting.

About Flexible Voting

Flexible Voting was originally developed as part of a grant from the Uniswap Foundation. It adds a simple building block to governance: the ability for a delegate to split voting weight across For, Against, or Abstain when submitting votes to the Governor contract. This capability is especially useful when a contract serves as the voting delegate. We call this feature "Flexible Voting."

This new building block allows for all kinds of new integrations and experiments to be built without compromising the security of a DAO's core Governance. A few examples of things that can be built with Flexible Voting include:

• Voting with tokens while earning yield in DeFi
• Voting on L2 with bridged tokens
• Shielded voting (i.e. secret/private voting)
• Optimistic off-chain-to-on-chain vote bridging
• Incentivized voting
• Quadratic voting
• And many more..

Importantly, the Flexible Voting extension provides a permissionless interface for third parties to develop new voting contracts, implementing whatever integrations or rules they'd like to see. We expect to see lots of innovation around DAO voting to occur using Flexible Voting.

Project Status

The Flexible Voting extension is complete and has been audited by OpenZeppelin. It was also audited again by Trail of Bits as part of the Frax Finance Governance audit.

Flexible Voting is being adopted by real DAOs. It is currently in production for Gitcoin, PoolTogether, and Frax Finance. It is also in the process of being adopted by a number of existing and forthcoming DAOs, including Arbitrum, Wormhole, and others.

In the case of Wormhole in particular, Flexible Voting serves as the basis for MultiGov, the cross chain DAO governance framework being developed in conjunction with Tally.

What's Next

In addition to working with numerous DAOs to see Flexible Voting adopted, we're also working with Tally and other DAO tooling providers to see it integrated into their products. We're also hoping to build out more Flexible Voting clients, such as shielded voting and others.

While we're excited to build out some of these usecases, we expect most voting contracts will ultimately be built by third party developers. We've had discussions with several third parties who are hoping to build their own integration with Flexible Voting. We want to focus on making the developer experience for third parties as easy as possible. That's why continuing to improve our documentation and easy-to-extend base contracts is another priority.