---
title: Proof of Humanity DAO
date: '2026-04-14'
draft: false
description: "A blockchain based identity project governed by a 1-person-1-vote DAO, which failed to establish a shared vision in the community."
status: failure
tags:
- crypto
- failure
external_url: https://proofofhumanity.id/
image: /img/logos/proof-of-humanity.png
banner: /img/banners/proof-of-humanity.png
author: ""
---
### Summary

Proof of Humanity, a blockchain-based digital identity registry, launched as a one-person-one-vote DAO in 2021. Rapid growth brought diverse communities with conflicting visions for the project. Fragmented Telegram groups prevented effective deliberation. The DAO forked in 2022 after failing to reconcile differences, showing how democratic governance requires robust deliberation infrastructure.

### Motivation and Readiness

PoH was transitioned into a DAO to experiment with the potential of a [one-person-one-vote DAO](https://blog.kleros.io/democracy-awakens/), a relatively rare mechanism in the broader blockchain ecosystem. The move gave PoH a type of ‘first mover advantage’. As the registry had only been launched a couple of months before being transitioned into a DAO, no real use case, beyond the distribution of UBI had been established or tested in the market. The early stage of transition likely contributed towards lower readiness.

### Process and Tensions

The main tension throughout the transition was a lack of unified vision in the community and an incomplete governance design which hampered the community deliberation process and lacked enforcement mechanisms. The transition was announced in a blog post and accompanied by the launch of a governance forum, the description of a very simple voting process (Humanity Improvement Proposals ‘HIP’s), and a Snapshot voting page connected to a Kleros Governor smart contract (anchoring votes on-chain).

Initially the DAO was set up to control the PoH smart contracts, the UBI smart contract and a 4.000.000 UBI treasury. The newly formed DAO was tasked with figuring out the rest, including which of the many potential [use cases](https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-a-building-block-for-the-internet-of-the-future/) to prioritize. As the community rapidly grew, it swiftly began adopting several HIPs to build more comprehensive governance processes, such as clarifying how exactly HIPs would progress through different stages and instituting the Mission Board to implement decisions that could not be enforced automatically on-chain.

However, despite its growing sophistication, the governance process and set up was not able to accommodate for the widely different visions that different parts of the community had for the project. A crucial factor that seems to have contributed to this failure was the fact that the community relied on various different Telegram chat groups for its deliberation.Although there were ‘official’ channels set up by the project founders, the community disagreed about who should be the admin of these groups and contested actions of existing admins. Given the low cost of exit new, competing groups began to emerge at a high rate. This ultimately led to a fragmentation of discourses and hampered efforts to find compromise.

Another issue that became apparent in the setup of the Mission Board was the fact that the two founding organizations, DEF and Kleros, also held different opinions on where the project should go, which led to infighting and undermined the legitimacy and efficacy of the Mission Board itself. The fact that the UBI token lost most of its value within the first few months of the DAOs existence further contributed to tensions within its community.

### Results

While PoH demonstrated that large-scale DAOs following a 1-person-1-vote principle are technically possible, the early transition and lack of supporting structures (especially for deliberation and decision enforcement) ultimately undermined the project’s succes.The PoH community decided to conduct a [‘Peaceful Fork’](https://gov.proofofhumanity.id/t/phase-3-binding-hip-74-a-peaceful-fork/2487) in November 2022. For this fork to come into effect, each side had to draw up and ratify a constitution outlining its vision and core values for the project. By voting for either of the constitutions, users could decide on which version of the protocol they would remain active. At the time of writing, only the PoH version supported by Kleros seems to remain active.

### Sources

- [PoH launch announcement](https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-building-the-internet-of-humans/)

- [UBI launch announcement](https://blog.kleros.io/introducing-ubi-universal-basic-income-for-humans/)

- [PoH DAO launch blog post](https://blog.kleros.io/democracy-awakens/)

- [Ethnographic research report on PoH’s governance and crisis](https://hal.science/hal-04855850/document)
