Multisignature wallets are a great tool to enhance decentralization and security of shared funds. Acknowledging the time and effort invested by signers is crucial for the long-term success of any multisig setup. However, different setups present various risks, and resources on the topic are scattered around the web.
Share your experience in the survey below and help establish a much‑needed educational foundation on the topic of multisig signer incentives.
DAOs and similar types of projects often manage shared funds through multisignature wallets. Aiming for decentralization and safety, having multiple signers is good practice to prevent a single point of failure and to distribute responsibility among the group members.
Unfortunately, it's not always clear how to fairly and reasonably incentivize individual signers. In many projects, balancing between responsivity and security is a real challenge. Let's take a look at two examples to highlight the intricacies involved:
Providing equal rewards to all multisig members (e.g. periodically each month) may seem equitable initially. Howerver, this approach opens up an opportunity for signers to become inactive while still passively collecting rewards, leading to unfair compensation of active signers. Over time, this can result in a majority of signers becoming inactive, hampering transaction processing and compromising the setup's efficiency.
Limiting rewards solely to those signing transactions fosters a competitive atmosphere where speed takes precedence over careful consideration. This may result in signers neglecting transaction details to secure personal rewards, ultimately undermining the enhanced security promised by multisignature setups.
As information and experience on multisig setups from individual projects is scattered across the web, often hidden in long forum threads, governance proposals, or Discord channels, the objective of this research is to compile the collective knowledge and establish a common educational resource, available in multiple formats:
Comprehensive publication on challenges of multisig signer incentive design, analysis of existing setups, and recommendations for actionable improvements.
Complete set of articles on the most important aspects of multisig signer incentive design, with examples and recommendations for implementation.
Easily sharable, bite-sized graphical pieces on specifics of the most valuable and interesting subtopics of multisig signer incentive design.
This research is made possible by you, the web3 community. By participating and sharing your experience, you will help others better understand the challenges of multisig signer incentive design. Through the collected data, we will be able to build an essential resource on this topic and help existing and upcoming projects responsibly reward their multisig signers while keeping their assets secure.
The project has been generously supported by the Safe Grants Program: