Quadratic Payments: A Primer

If you follow applied mechanism design or decentralized governance at all, you may have recently heard one of a few buzzwords: quadratic voting, quadratic funding and quadratic attention purchase. These ideas have been gaining popularity rapidly over the last few years, and small-scale tests have already been deployed: the Taiwanese presidential hackathon used quadratic voting to vote on winning projects, Gitcoin Grants used quadratic funding to fund public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem, and the Colorado Democratic party also experimented with quadratic voting to determine their party platform.

If you follow applied mechanism design or decentralized governance at all, you may have recently heard one of a few buzzwords: quadratic voting, quadratic funding and quadratic attention purchase. These ideas have been gaining popularity rapidly over the last few years, and small-scale tests have already been deployed: the Taiwanese presidential hackathon used quadratic voting to vote on winning projects, Gitcoin Grants used quadratic funding to fund public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem, and the Colorado Democratic party also experimented with quadratic voting to determine their party platfo