Hybrid Voting
Voting is the way DAO managers make decisions: a decision is considered adopted once a quorum has been reached.
In XDAO, votes created by DAO managers last three days. If a vote is not adopted, it will be rejected once the three days have elapsed.
XDAO lets you manage a DAO far more economically and efficiently thanks to its hybrid voting model.
Off-chain DAO voting is shown in the diagram below.
Off-chain voting with on-chain execution is designed to achieve the ideal balance between transaction speed and cost. This is what we call the hybrid voting mechanism.
With fully on-chain voting, every action is recorded on the blockchain: creating the vote, each member's signature, and executing the decision in the DAO. An average non-urgent transaction on Ethereum takes about 3 minutes, and confirmation from the network must be awaited at every step.
Let's compare how much time voting takes under both approaches (the example uses a DAO with two members):
| Stage | On-chain voting | Hybrid voting |
|---|---|---|
| Creating the vote | ~3 min | 0 min (off-chain) |
| Each member's signature | ~3 min per member | 0 min (off-chain) |
| Recording the final decision on the blockchain | ~3 min | ~3 min |
The difference becomes especially noticeable as the number of members grows:
- A DAO with 2 members: on-chain — roughly 12–15 minutes, hybrid — about 3 minutes.
- A DAO with 200 members: on-chain — around 10 hours, hybrid — the same ~3 minutes (assuming everyone votes at once).
On-chain voting can be sped up by raising the gas price, but that makes it very expensive. The hybrid mechanism removes this trade-off: votes are collected off-chain, and only the DAO's final action is recorded on the blockchain. This preserves the balance between transparency and fast, cheap voting.