A new important DAO paper just dropped, introducing Dark DAOs and how they pose a threat to any existing DAO.

Today a new paper was published by James Austgen, Andres Fabrega, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, Mahimna Kelkar, and Ari Jules. I myself only know of Ari Jules who works at the IC3, and is a professor at Cornell, as well as the chief scientist at Chainlink Labs. The paper came to my attention after seeing his tweet: https://twitter.com/AriJuels/status/1722303090328572035

I will try to keep this post concise and do my best to attempt to explain the whole thing using a small number of bullet points. Ask any questions if it's unclear.

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• The paper proposes a system called Voting-Block Entropy (VBE) which allows for a measurement of how decentralized a DAO actually is.
• If one wants to bribe a DAO then the cost of the bride will increase with the measured entropy of the DAO.
• A Dark DAO is defined as a “decentralized cartel that buys on-chain votes opaquely.”
• The main mechanism by which a Dark DAO achieves its properties is key encumbrance. Basically allowing a wallet to hand over the keys where the Dark DAO can only use the wallet for casting a vote.
• There are 2 main ways to make this key encumbrance possible, through secure multiparty computation (MPC) and trusted execution environments (TEEs). TEEs are the more practical approach in the real world.
• Since very recently TEEs are possible to use in almost any EVM with the use of Oasis Sapphire (ROSE), allowing for privacy in any EVM and also Ethereum itself.
• The paper shows how it is actually possible to use a Dark DAO using Oasis Sapphire to manipulate votes on Snapshot, but it also highlights: "To the best of our knowledge, however, all current DAO voting platforms are susceptible to Dark DAO interference."

New developments in blockchain have allowed for vulnerabilities in these 'old' systems