The handbook

Docs

Everything we measure, how we measure it, and how to plug into the dataset.

Data sources

  • Snapshot GraphQL — off-chain proposals and votes for 50 monitored DAOs, polled every 5 minutes.
  • Tally API — on-chain Governor proposals (Compound, Uniswap, ENS, Arbitrum, Optimism, Aave), so we cover DAOs that vote on-chain rather than via Snapshot.
  • DeFiLlama & CoinGecko — DAO treasury USD value (daily) and governance-token prices (every 6 hours).
  • ENS & Karma — names and third-party reputation scores layered onto top delegate profiles.
  • No proprietary data — everything we use is public, free, and reproducible.

Democracy Score formula

Score 0-100 = weighted sum of five components, recomputed daily:

  • participation × 0.25
  • powerDistribution × 0.25 (1 - Gini)
  • proposalDiversity × 0.15 (unique authors)
  • delegateAccountability × 0.15
  • manipulationResistance × 0.20

Alert types

  • 🐳 Whale vote — single address ≥5% of total VP. Severity by % (info / warning / critical).
  • Last-minute swing — leading choice flips in the final 10% of voting window.
  • Quorum risk — active proposal with <80% of quorum and >75% of window elapsed.
  • 📉 Score drop — DAO Democracy Score loses ≥5 points day-over-day.
  • 🤝 Coordinated voting — 3+ addresses with similar VP voting identically inside the same hour.

Embeddable badge

Drop on your DAO docs, README, or homepage:

<img
  src="https://daosentinel.xyz/api/badge/uniswap"
  alt="Democracy Score" />

SVG, CORS-open, cached for 5 minutes at the edge. Replace uniswap with any DAO slug from the explorer.

More

Prefer a feed reader? Subscribe to the Atom feed for governance alerts across all DAOs, or swap alerts.xml for /api/feed/dao/[slug] to follow a single DAO. No auth required — same data as the Open API.