Anthill: a governance system 🐜

7 min readJan 18, 2023

Website WIP (currently only liquid reputation works): https://anthilldao.dev
Code: https://github.com/kelemeno/anthill

Intro:

Tldr:

Anthill is a governance framework for Daos.
It provides a reputation system, a representation system, and will provide basic subdao management.
It is compatible with external voting systems, and when coupled with one, will be a self-governed system.

Use case

Anthill aims to be a democratic, legitimate, self-governed system. In Vitalik’s terminology, Anthill aims to be a sovereign entity.

Anthill is similar to liquid democracy. In a liquid democracy, people can vote on certain issues, or they can redelegate their votes to others who can vote on their behalf. Similarly, people can receive votes and redelegate them further if they wish.

The difference is that Anthill is not a voting system, but a governance system. This means that the goal of Anthill is not to gather opinions about single issues but to allocate roles and responsibilities to individuals, in a legitimate way. Roles and responsibilities are structured in hierarchies, so that is also how participants can organize themselves in Anthill.

To make the hierarchy legitimate, Anthill uses a bottom-up reputation system, where participants can receive and pass on reputation. People with higher reputation can rise in the tree, replacing less reputable participants. This hierarchic liquid reputation system is the core of Anthill. It provides a legitimate bottom-up structure.

Anthill is governance oriented. Besides defining the legitimate hierarchy, tasks have to be assigned. This happens like in traditional systems: by assigning by hand certain well-defined roles to subgroups, and to individuals in these subgroups. These subgroups will have well-defined locations in the hierarchy. Anthill provides the tools in which these subgroups can change their membership, move around, merge with each other, or split up, all in the context of the legitimate hierarchy.

Finally, we come to the question of self-governance, which will be achieved by voting. The whole of the Anthill hierarchy, subhierarchies, and subgroups can participate in external voting mechanisms to decide on specific topics. Anthill is agnostic towards these mechanisms, they might use secret or public voting, they might be one-person-one-vote, or reputation based. However, the governance of Anthill will also need a voting mechanism to make decisions. It is expected that some decisions will be based on a reputation vote in the highest subgroup of Anthill, some decisions will be based on a system-wide reputation vote, and some will need to be made on a system-wide one-person-one-vote mechanism. Establishing which approach fits each specific question will have to be decided by the practice of politics. A similar approach will work for the subhierarchies and the subgroups.

The core liquid reputation system

Short description:

In Anthill you are in a rooted tree graph of people.
You start with a reputation score of 1.
You can increase your reputation by receiving reputation from underneath you in the tree.
You can share your reputation with people higher than you (this does not decrease your own reputation).
If you have a higher reputation than your parent, you can switch positions.
This reputation can be used as voting power in voting mechanisms.

Properties and Consequences:

Tldr:

It is a non-zero-sum “game”, this leads to better connections between delegators and delegates, and to higher participation in votes. It also leads to chains of representatives.
The incentives of reputation delegation lead to the expression of local structure. This means real local communities can also be close together in the tree.
Subgroups can buffer themselves from each other. This makes them much for flexible, they can move around, add or remove members, split up, or merge. Subgroups can easily reuse the assigned reputations in their own voting mechanisms, making the creation of subdaos simple.

Non-zero-sum delegation

In liquid democracy, votes are delegated to someone else, and the recipient controls the votes. This also means, that if the delegator wants to vote, they have to regain control over their voting power. This makes delegation a zero-sum game, delegates have no interest in the delegators voting, as that would decrease their own voting power. This also makes redelegation less likely, after all, there is no benefit to delegating to someone who redelegates.

In the liquid reputation system that Anthill implements, delegators don’t lose their reputation when delegating. After the reputations are calculated, they can be channeled into a voting system, where everyone can vote with their own reputation. This encourages engagement between delegators and delegates, as the delegates can encourage their perhaps apathetic delegators to go vote on topics, in a non-zero-sum way. So this system increases engagement.

It also makes redelegation more likely, after all, there is a direct benefit to redelegation, your delegated reputation counts more times! This means we will see “chains of delegation”.

Finally, this inclusiveness does not endanger the professional nature of liquid democracy, as most of the voting power will be concentrated at the top of the hierarchy, assuming that most people delegate their reputation.

2. Local delegation and subgroups

As discussed in a liquid democracy there is little use in redelegating. This means most participants will end up delegating their votes to a small number of final delegates who vote on everyone’s behalf.

In our described liquid reputation system, participants are incentivized to delegate their reputation as low in the tree as possible (due to the non-zero-sum nature of the system, the lower they delegate the more times the reputation is counted). The result is that participants are incentivized to be close to their chosen delegation chain. People will trust and be close to delegates that they know personally. This means the tree captures the finer structure of society.

Capturing this finer structure makes this system compatible with real local communities. People in a given local community do not have to agree on everything to also be close in the tree, they just have to find someone close to whom they trust to delegate their votes. Arguably, if they cannot find anybody in their local community whom they trust, then they should find another community.

This also means that a diverse local community can join the tree as it is. Each participant will be able to fully express their political preference via more reputable members of the local community. This makes this system compatible with real groups.

3. Subgroups and subdaos

In the day-to-day life of local communities, there needs to be a lot of flexibility. People resign and are hired, teams might merge, be reassigned to another department, or even be split up. Fortunately, Anthill can be similarly flexible.

Subgroups in the tree can be buffered from each other (by participants who only have a single child node). Members of such buffered groups can easily move around in the group without affecting the layout of other buffered groups. Members can similarly leave the group or new members might join. These buffered groups (with the correct permissions) can also move around the tree, independently of each other. It is also easy to split up or merge these buffered groups.

This means that the tree will not be one monolithic entity. It will provide the required flexibility for participants and subgroups to be independent. At the same time, it will embed them into one larger entity.

This cast iron anthill is also composed of independent subgroups

Walkthrough for the current website

Website WIP (currently only liquid reputation works): https://anthilldao.dev

Let’s look at an example. The people in the tree are organized into a binary tree, everyone can have at most two people directly underneath them. The reputation votes are less restricted, votes go from people lower in the tree to higher people, and any number of reputation votes can be given or received.

Dhruv and Xin Yi joined the tree under some Other person. Dhruv got there first, so Xin Yi had to join the tree underneath him (and there are no more open spots under the Other person). When Xin Yi joined, she automatically gave a reputation vote to Dhruv making his reputation 2 (one from Xin Yi, and one from himself). Unfortunately, Xin Yi does not like Dhruv, so she removes the reputation vote, bringing his reputation down to 1.

Fatima has also arrived and wants to join the tree. She can join the tree under Dhruv, or under Xin Yi. She also does not like Dhruv but loves Xin Yi, so she joins the tree under her.

Now that she joined, she changes her name to something more legible.

When Fatima joined, she automatically gave her reputation to Xin Yi. This brings Xin Yi’s reputation up to 2, which is higher than Dhruv’s! Because of this, Xin Yi can switch positions with Dhruv.