Introducing multichain voting – powered by LayerZero
Governance in a rollup centric world
As we head towards a rollup centric world, more and more protocols find themselves with governance tokens spread across multiple chains, yet governors today still assume that tokens exist on the same chain as the governor. This means that over time as tokens spread across chains, votable supply falls, and protocols become more vulnerable to attacks via voting buying.
Today, a common solution to this problem is to deploy the governor on multiple chains, then aggregating the voting result into a hub chain from each governor. The problem with this approach is that voters will need to send one transaction per chain where they have received voting power, making it increasingly more expensive to engage in governance over time as tokens spread to more chains. Given how difficult it is already to get governance participation, this approach leaves much to be desired.
Introducing Agora’s multichain governor module
To address the growing need for governance in a multichain world, Agora is excited to announce our multichain governor module, which leverages LayerZero’s lzRead technology to provide a highly secure and seamless cross-chain voting experience. Through this governor module, voters are able to cast votes in a single transaction using voting power from any of the 100+ chains supported by LayerZero.
lzRead and lzCompute abstract the complexity of reading and aggregating voting power snapshots from multiple chains on the DVN into a single payload. Combined with the power of Agora’s voting modules, this preserves the elegance of the AgoraGovernor architecture. The user experience remains indistinguishable from that of a single-chain governor, while all the powerful features of the AgoraGovernor stay fully intact.
In addition, this solution requires no modifications to existing ERC-20 tokens, which may already be deployed on any or all of the supported chains—provided they conform to the ERC20Votes interface. In practice, this architecture effortlessly scales with the addition of new chains, ensuring the user experience remains consistent and unaffected.
In this architecture, users submit their vote directly to the governor. The governor then forwards a request to LayerZero to aggregate voting power. LayerZero reads voting power from each chain, consolidates it into a single cumulative total, and sends it back to the governor, where the vote is tallied.
The read and aggregation logic is divided between lzVoteMain, deployed on the governor’s chain, and lzVoteSide, deployed on each chain where the tokens exist. lzVoteSide reads voting power from ERC-20 contracts and sends the results to LayerZero’s DVN, while lzVoteMain consolidates the data and provides a callback to the voting module.
Security profile
With lzRead, security is both application-owned and configurable, adhering to the same flexible framework as LayerZero’s core messaging protocol. Each application using Agora’s governance module can implement a unique security stack, selecting the specific type and number of Decentralized Verifier Networks (DVNs) that meet its requirements. DVNs are responsible for retrieving and computing data, enabling Agora’s governance to operate securely across multiple chains without relying on a single provider.
This vendor-agnostic security model allows applications to adapt their security stack dynamically as new DVNs come online or based on specific use cases, such as adding more DVNs for high-value governance votes or risky chains. Agora and apps using Agora for governance can currently leverage a diverse range of DVNs from entities like BCW, Nethermind, Animoca/Blockdaemon, Nocturnal, and AltLayer, assembling a security stack tailored to its needs.
LayerZero’s infrastructure, trusted by over 300 applications and securing $50 billion in assets across 100+ chains, empowers Agora to scale security seamlessly. From single-DVN setups for basic queries to multi-verifier configurations for critical governance, lzRead provides resilient, adaptable, and highly customizable security for every application within Agora’s governance ecosystem.