Hello Polygon Community,
I’m an independent researcher focusing on smart contract efficiency, and I’ve been closely studying the architectural trade-offs in Proof-of-Stake and DAO governance systems. I wanted to share some research that I believe could be a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversation here.
The Core Challenge: The Cost of Security
Polygon’s delegated Proof-of-Stake model is a robust and effective system for network security. At a foundational level, it shares a challenge with many on-chain governance systems: the need to securely snapshot user balances (or stakes) to determine their power.
As you know, this often involves checkpointing logic that can add gas overhead to core functions like staking, unstaking, delegating and claimrewards. This is a necessary cost for security, but it’s a cost nonetheless.
An Alternative Architectural Pattern: Reactive Governance
My research proposes an alternative design pattern called “Reactive Governance” that provides the same robust security guarantees but with a different efficiency profile. The core idea is to shift from a proactive to a “reactive” or “just-in-time” system.
Instead of snapshotting on every transaction, the system only takes a snapshot under one specific condition: if a user attempts to alter their stake (stake, unstake, delegate) while a critical event is in progress (e.g., a live DAO vote, or during a specific validator epoch).
This model isolates the cost of security to the specific moment it’s needed, rather than socializing it across all transactions. My analysis shows this can completely eliminate the gas overhead on standard transfers, making the underlying staking/governance token more efficient.
Seeking Feedback
I believe this “reactive” model could be an interesting architectural pattern for dApps building on Polygon, for future L2s, or even for discussions around the evolution of the core protocol.
I would be honored to get feedback on this concept from the brilliant builders and researchers in the Polygon ecosystem.
And for those who want to dive into the formal proofs and the open-source Solidity code, the full research paper is available here
Thank you for your time and for building such a foundational piece of the Web3 infrastructure.