Quorum

Quorum is the minimum amount of voting participation a governance proposal must attract for its result to count, regardless of whether the votes cast are mostly in favor. In DAOs, quorum is usually defined as a minimum number of tokens voting — or a minimum percentage of the total supply — rather than a number of individual voters. A proposal that wins 95 percent approval still fails if turnout falls short of quorum.

A concrete example: a DAO might require that at least 4 percent of the token supply participate for a vote to be valid. If the supply is one billion tokens, at least 40 million tokens' worth of votes must be cast. A treasury-spending proposal that attracts only 25 million tokens of votes fails on turnout alone, even if nearly all of them voted yes.

Quorum exists to prevent a tiny, unrepresentative group from pushing through decisions while everyone else is inattentive — a real risk, since voter turnout in most DAOs is chronically low. But it cuts both ways: set the quorum too high and routine governance stalls because ordinary proposals cannot reach it, a failure mode many DAOs have experienced. A common misconception is that quorum measures approval; it measures participation only, and a proposal must typically clear both the quorum threshold and a majority (or supermajority) of votes cast to pass.