PROOF OF HUMANITY: ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH OF A "DEMOCRATIC" DAO

Abstract

In 2021, the Proof of Humanity (PoH) project debuted as the first Sybil-resistant registry of“unique and singular” individuals on the Ethereum network. The project offers an economic incentivethrough collaboration with the Universal Basic Income (UBI) smart contract, which distributes $UBIcryptocurrency tokens to registered humans. The PoH registry, equipped with measures to combatfraudulent registrations or bot impersonations, allows users to challenge suspicious profiles. Thesechallenges are adjudicated by Kleros' Humanity Court. Within two years, over 17,000 registrants joinedthe registry. The founding organization, Kleros Cooperative, announced the registry would be gov-erned by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The launch of the PoH DAO, the first in theEthereum ecosystem to implement a 1-person-1-vote liquid democracy system, challenged traditionaltoken-weighted voting mechanisms in DAO governance. Despite gaining recognition and endorsementfrom influential figures like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the community grappled with irrecon-cilable long-term visions, leading to the adoption of a binding proposal to "fork" by the end of 2022,highlighting underlying challenges within the PoH DAO. In 2022, our team at BlockchainGov conducteda research study to explore the governance dynamics that led to the PoH DAO’s governance crisis andsubsequent decision to “fork.”