Dayan: Dark DAOs can bribe Proof-of-Stake validators to execute consensus attacks
Phil Dayan · a16z Podcast | Voting, Security, and Governance in Blockchains and Cryptonetworks · Feb 26, 2019 · at 27:09
Phil Dayan, a PhD researcher at Cornell Tech, explains how Dark DAOs can construct high-yield staking pools to buy votes and manipulate transaction ordering in Proof-of-Stake networks.
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“So what you can do with a dark DAO is start a staking pool where I say, like, you know, let me do my algorithmic trading and decide what order of transactions makes me the most money. You don't necessarily care if someone who's doing a transaction on a DEX gets front run and loses, like, five dollars, right? So you say, okay, I'll happily participate in this. It'll still keep the value of my coins high, especially if I don't have a lot of coins and you're paying me, like, twice as much as any other staking pool. So it sort of opens these coordination mechanisms for attacks on the underlying transaction history and the underlying consensus.”
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