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

A Sybil attack is when a single entity creates multiple fake identities or accounts to gain disproportionate influence. In a simple one-token-one-vote system, a whale could split their tokens across many wallets to appear as many voters.

Quadratic voting mitigates this by making the cost of increasing voting power through token splitting less effective. The cost of acquiring more tokens to vote quadratically is still the dominant factor, discouraging the creation of numerous fake identities.