What happens when the guy with 1% of the votes votes to give himself all the money? · ↗ www.coindesk.com

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are organizations governed by votes on the blockchain, typically with votes proportional to tokens held. Of course, this being crypto, any supposed purpose is usually overshadowed by speculation on the price of the underlying coin.

DAOs have a storied history of failure. The original DAO caused the second-largest blockchain to split in two over whether to undermine the fundamental promise of crypto to bail out rich token holders (the yes side won). Another DAO raised money to buy a copy of the US Constitution and failed, only to discover that issuing refunds is really expensive in crypto.

But today’s story is one of a DAO working exactly as intended.

BonkDAO governs BONK, yet another dog-themed meme coin. It controlled a treasury worth about $20 million USD. An anonymous wallet spent $4.4 million USD buying just over 1% of the total supply of BONK. This was somehow enough to meet the DAO’s quorum requirement all by itself.

The wallet proposed transferring the entire treasury to another address it controlled. Only seven wallets bothered to vote, and only two voted yes: the creator of the proposal and one other random wallet. But that was enough for the proposal to pass with 99.9% of the voting power. The transfer then executed automatically.

BonkDAO has called this an attack and contacted law enforcement, which feels a little unsporting. There was no hack and no code exploit. The attacker bought the votes, proposed giving himself all the money, won, and collected.

Code is law. This is democracy manifest.