veDelegate (and similar tools) submit automatic abstain votes for every wallet they manage. That inflates quorum, flattens rewards, and turns governance into a pure-capital game. We should treat this as a bug: only explicit abstain votes should count. Fixing it would (1) restore higher rewards for people who actually show up and (2) give quorum real meaning again.
Why this matters
No pay-off for participation – Today every wallet, active or inert, earns the same governance-reward share because veDelegate “votes” abstain on their behalf. A user who reads proposals and casts a position gets nothing extra for the effort.
Quorum distortion & attack vectors – Automatic abstains push every proposal close to quorum by default. That:
Lets a tiny minority decide outcomes once the abstain bulk is tallied.
It defeats the purpose of having a quorum.
Enables anyone who can scrape delegate snapshots to “front-run” results.
Community morale – When diligence is worth zero more than apathy, people eventually stop showing up. That’s fatal to thoughtful governance.
Proposed direction (for feedback)
1. Outlaw automatic “abstain” ballots
Delegation services may keep casting only explicit choices on a user’s behalf.
2. Enforce at the protocol layer
Each ballot—for, against, or abstain—is accepted only if accompanied by a cryptographic signature produced with the voter’s private key.
Because the signature embeds the vote choice (e.g., hash(proposal-ID, stance)), it cannot be forged without the private key.
Unsigned or mismatched ballots are rejected on-chain, so mass “lazy abstain” schemes simply fail to execute.
Looking forward to hearing the opinion of other people and see if this technical implementation makes sense, if it will break something or if there are alternatives to tackle this.
Technically I believe a private key signing is difficult. veDelegate uses Smart Wallets, and there are now a lot of Smart Wallets using with the vechain kit. There is no private key involved.
Also this would not prevent anyone from automating these actions using private keys instead.
Would involving something like a captcha be a better solution, to enforce human interaction?
You are right, requiring a signing of a private key (which with smart accounts is possible, since they have an owner() getter) it’s something that can be bypassed.
Regarding the captcha:
it would completely centralize the voting phase, creating a blocker for the dao (and for possible future regulations)
wouldn’t this break as well veDelegate?
people would need to use specific tools, stopping technological advancement in the space
Just to touch a little bit more and brainstorm here about private key signatures.
We know if someone is voting from a smart contract or not. We can know if that smart contract is a Smart Account or a TBA. We know that both of them have an “owner()” getter.
Couldn’t we say: if you are voting with an EOA then no sign is needed, otherwise get the signature and verify it against the “owner” of the smart contract (if they are SA or TBA), if the smart contract does not have an “owner” then you cannot vote.
This won’t work 100%, it could be enough for veDelegate ( or other services) to set the owner of all the TBA to one of his wallet, but this will make the product not decentralized and it will be up to the users to decide if they want to risk it for a bit more of rewards or not.