A Reputation-Based Vesting Mechanism for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Abstract

In Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the lack of centralized authority makes it particularly difficult to incentivize high-quality contributions. Existing mechanisms mostly adopt one-time rewards, which are prone to inducing short-term speculative behaviors. To address this issue, a novel reputation-based vesting mechanism is proposed in the context of an infinitely repeated decentralized collaboration game. In this design, participants receive an immediate reward based on their current reputation, with the remainder vested for future release. The release conditions are strictly tied to their continued submission and production of valid outputs. The proposed mechanism is then demonstrated to provide incentive compatibility, Sybil resistance, and collusion resistance. Furthermore, computational experiments are conducted to validate the vesting mechanism, and results show that it can achieve endogenous security without relying on centralized identity verification or external enforcement.