What Is a Sybil Attack and How Does Quadratic Voting Attempt to Mitigate It?

A Sybil attack occurs when a single entity creates multiple pseudonymous identities to gain a disproportionately large influence in a decentralized system. In governance, this means one whale could split their tokens across many wallets to vote multiple times, circumventing one-token-one-vote limits.

Quadratic voting (QV) makes this attack less cost-effective. Since the cost of votes increases quadratically, the attacker would have to spend significantly more to gain the same voting power by splitting tokens than by voting from a single large wallet.

Proof-of-personhood solutions are also explored to further mitigate Sybil attacks.