Quorum (Governance)

A quorum is the minimum amount of participation required before a vote or decision is treated as valid. Company meetings set quorums for shareholders and a board of directors, and crypto projects set them for proposals voted on by holders of a governance token. In a DAO, the quorum is usually expressed as a number of tokens, or a percentage of supply, that must vote for or take part in a proposal; if turnout falls short, the proposal fails even if most votes were in favour. Setting the level is a balancing act: too high and nothing passes because many holders never vote, too low and a small, well-organised group can push changes through. Low turnout has made some DAOs vulnerable to governance attacks using borrowed tokens. The word is unrelated to Quorum, an enterprise version of Ethereum originally developed at J.P. Morgan.