Governance Fork Farming: Incentive Exploitation Through Repeated Fork Capture in DeFi and PoS Networks

Abstract

<b><i>Governance Fork Farming</i></b> is a strategic exploitation pattern in decentralized finance (DeFi) and proof-of-stake (PoS) ecosystems where actors repeatedly engineer, anticipate, or provoke governance forks to extract economic rewards. By positioning capital, validator power, or voting rights ahead of contentious governance events, attackers harvest duplicated assets, incentives, or control advantages across forked states. This threat undermines governance legitimacy and destabilizes network continuity without violating protocol rules.