A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a novel form of blockchain-based organization designed for collective decision-making. As DAOs emphasize a decentralized, democratic decision-making approach, participation serves as the foundation for their sustainable operation and development. Unfortunately, many DAOs struggle with low participation rates, often falling short of the required quorum. To address this critical issue, an increasing number of DAOs have adopted delegated voting, which allows members to transfer their voting rights to others. However, the impact of delegated voting within the DAO context remains unknown. By leveraging variation in the adoption of delegated voting across DAOs, we find that delegated voting increases members’ participation in proposal voting and enhances decision quality. Our results further show that delegated voting stimulates greater participation in proposals with higher participation costs, including those that are more complex, urgent, or operational in nature. However, in the long term, delegated voting also leads to greater voting power concentration and reduces engagement from both new and active voters, potentially harming sustained participation and the growth of the DAO community. Overall, our findings highlight the need for DAOs to balance the short-term gains from higher participation with the potential long-term risks to decentralization.
Modern charitable donation platforms involve multiple stakeholders, including donors, charity organizations, financial institutions, and regulatory authorities. However, traditional centralized systems often suffer from limited transparency, weak trust management, and insufficient traceability, which significantly undermine public confidence in charitable activities. To address these challenges, this study proposes an intelligent blockchain-enabled framework for transparent multi-stakeholder donation management. The proposed system integrates consortium blockchain infrastructure with smart contract mechanisms to support trustworthy transactions, automated governance, and transparent information sharing across participating entities. The framework adopts a modular architecture that facilitates role separation, traceable transaction management, and scalable system evolution. In addition, the system enables transparent supervision and evaluation processes, allowing donors, recipients, and regulatory bodies to participate in collaborative monitoring of charitable activities. A prototype implementation based on the FISCO BCOS consortium blockchain platform is developed to evaluate the feasibility and performance of the proposed framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the system effectively enhances traceability, operational transparency, and trust among participants while maintaining acceptable performance in terms of throughput and latency. The proposed framework provides a practical reference architecture for developing intelligent and trustworthy multi-party platforms and contributes new insights into the design of decentralized expert systems for social good applications.