We’re thrilled to announce a transformative update for Mainnet DAOs—introducing gasless onchain voting. This milestone marks a significant leap forward for onchain governance, enabling DAOs to offer a crosschain, secure, and free voting experience for members.

What’s New

Mainnet DAO participants can now cast votes for free with the latest update to our Multichain Governance plugin. This iteration integrates LayerZero V2 to aggregate votes on the voting chain, which are then relayed and compiled on the home chain. It also leverages ZKsync’s native account abstraction and txSync’s Tsuko paymaster functionality, subsidizing voting gas costs for DAO members. The plugin is bridge, chain, and paymaster agnostic. DAOs can integrate the solutions of their choice.

Why We Built It

In DAO governance, participation isn’t just a metric—it’s the foundation of security and legitimacy. Yet, high gas fees have consistently hindered voter engagement, forcing many DAOs to resort to offchain solutions that compromise the security, censorship-resistance, and trust-minimization of onchain execution.

Our solution moves accessible voting back onchain, empowering DAOs to maintain the security of onchain governance while casting votes for free. This not only improves DAO member experience, but encourages more active participation to ensure all stakeholders have a say.

What It Enables for DAOs

Since our initial launch of the Multichain Governance plugin in November 2023, we've continued to be relentless in our pursuit of solving these critical onchain governance challenges. Here’s what this new iteration brings to the table:

Vote from any EVM chain: DAOs can now designate any secondary chain for voting, with LayerZero seamlessly aggregating votes back to the primary chain. Minimal bridging is required—users simply bridge their tokens to the desired chain, and the system handles the rest.
Gasless voting via paymaster integration: Utilizing ZKsync’s native account abstraction, we’ve implemented a paymaster workflow, with txSync’s Tsuko paymaster, subsidized by Aragon that covers all gas costs for votes cast on ZKsync, enabling truly gasless voting for DAO participants.
Seamless user experience: A customizable front-end streamlines the process, allowing users to bridge tokens and vote in one place, ensuring a smooth and integrated experience.
Unified crosschain execution: With built-in LayerZero OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) integration, DAOs can scale governance and execute proposals across as many chains as needed while maintaining a single, cohesive permission system that is controlled by token holders across all chains.
Modular and composable design: Our plugin is built from modular, loosely coupled components, making it adaptable to the unique needs of any DAO. Whether it’s changing the bridging protocol, chain, or adding new governance features, the system can evolve with the DAO’s requirements.

How It Works

Here are the key steps to pass a proposal:

Bridge Tokens: Members can bridge tokens from the execution chain to the voting chain prior to proposal creation. Members can also stay on the execution chain and bridging back is always an option.
Create Proposal: Members with the minimum amount of tokens set by the DAO can create proposals.
Voting Phase: Eligible members vote directly on the voting or execution chain, with votes aggregated until dispatched.
Dispatch Votes: Aggregated votes are dispatched from the voting chain to the execution chain.
Receive Votes: The execution chain validates and updates the proposal’s vote balance with the received votes.
Execute Proposal: The proposal is executed across all chains included in the proposal.

Aragon DAOs need to install the Multichain Governance v2 Plugin (Toucan Voting) and pair it with a dedicated UX. Our team can help with the deployment and installation. Below is a diagram of the technical architecture of the plugin, to learn more take a look at the GitHub repository.

What’s Next

Our commitment to solving these challenges and advancing onchain governance is unwavering. Moving forward, we are exploring the use of storage proofs with RISC Zero to further streamline the voting process by eliminating the need for bridging and enabling custom multichain census compilation. Our collaboration is paving the way for these next-level innovations, and we look forward to sharing more details soon.

Work With Us

Multichain builds are complex. We build governance technology so you can focus on developing your protocol. Our solutions are primed for rapid deployment with extensive customization options to fit your specific needs. Designed to scale with your DAO, our governance solutions provide the flexibility to adapt as the decentralized landscape continues to evolve.

Reach out to us to explore our end-to-end custom DAO deployment solutions here.