Voting Power
Voting power in CipherDAO is tied directly to CIPHER OWLS ownership and calculated entirely on-chain.
How it’s calculated
When a vote opens, the governance program checks how many Cipher Owl NFTs the wallet controls at that moment. It applies a tier lookup table and assigns voting power:
| Owls held | Voting power |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |
| 3 | 2 |
| 6+ | 5 |
There’s no off-chain discretion or manual adjustment. NFT balance is queried, matched to the tier, and recorded for that proposal.
Vote locking
Once a voting window opens, voting power is fixed for the duration of the vote. Transferring NFTs after the snapshot has no effect. This prevents last-minute manipulation.
Submitting a vote
Votes are submitted as signed on-chain transactions. Each vote includes:
- The proposal identifier
- The voter’s wallet address
- The calculated voting power
The program verifies NFT ownership, applies the tier logic, and increments the proposal’s vote totals. All of this is publicly verifiable on-chain.
Council voting
Council wallets are whitelisted in the governance program and receive a separate, fixed voting allowance:
- 1 vote per month (unused votes don’t stack)
- During the bootstrapping phase, limits are relaxed so the protocol can move decisively
- All council votes are recorded on-chain and auditable, the same as community votes
Council mechanics use the same on-chain transaction flow as regular votes, with an additional role check for council wallet eligibility.