The Challenge: Measuring What Matters in DAO Governance

In DAOs, active and thoughtful participation is the cornerstone of effective governance. As these organizations manage significant treasuries and protocols, the need to attract and retain high-quality contributors is paramount. Incentive programs are a powerful tool to achieve this, but they face a fundamental challenge: how to accurately reward the quality of a contribution, not just its quantity.

Current incentive models typically fall into one of two traps:

  1. Reliance on easily quantifiable metrics, such as voting participation rates, total voting power, or number of posts. While objective, these systems are often gamed, encouraging superficial "check-the-box" participation or AI-generated spam that adds little substantive value.
  2. Dependence on centralized committees to judge qualitative work. While well-intentioned, this introduces subjectivity and bottlenecks that run counter to the decentralized ethos of a DAO.

This creates a critical gap: a failure to properly incentivize the deep research, nuanced feedback, and constructive debate that are most vital to a DAO's long-term health and security in a scalable way.

The Solution: The Peer Recognition Score (PRS)

To solve this widespread problem, we propose a new, adaptable framework for assessing governance contributions: The Peer Recognition Score (PRS).

The PRS operates on a simple but powerful premise: the most qualified judges of a contribution's value are the engaged peers who participate in governance alongside one another. By leveraging this peer-to-peer signal, the PRS moves beyond simplistic quantitative metrics. It is not meant to replace existing measures but to complement them, adding a decentralized, scalable, and community-driven signal of contribution quality.

A Modular Framework for Better Incentives

The PRS is designed as a modular component that can enhance any existing delegate incentive program or serve as the foundation for a new one. By rewarding thoughtful engagement that earns community respect, it creates a powerful social layer that aligns financial rewards with genuine influence and fosters a culture of high-quality contribution.

How it Works: A Three-Step Process

The PRS is calculated in three steps: first, we score individual comments; second, we normalize those scores to find the best comments within each discussion; and third, we aggregate those scores into a final score.

Step 1: Scoring Each Comment

Every comment gets a raw score based on the likes it receives. The weight of each like is determined by the influence of the person who gave it, using the formula:

like_weight = role_multiplier × (baseline + sqrt(VP / VP_ref))

Role Multipliers