Supermajority
A voting threshold requiring more than a simple majority, such as two-thirds or three-quarters, typically used for higher-stakes governance decisions.
A supermajority is a voting threshold set higher than a simple 50%-plus-one majority, such as two-thirds, three-quarters, or another elevated fraction, required for a proposal to pass. Governance systems commonly reserve supermajority requirements for their highest-stakes or most consequential decisions — such as upgrading core protocol logic, changing fundamental governance rules themselves, or accessing a treasury's reserves — while routine, lower-stakes proposals may only need a simple majority or a lower quorum (see Kaavon's "Quorum" glossary definition) threshold.
Requiring a supermajority makes a decision meaningfully harder to pass, which is a deliberate design choice intended to ensure broad, resilient community support exists before a particularly consequential or hard-to-reverse action proceeds, rather than letting a narrow, potentially temporary majority push through changes that a large minority strongly opposes. The specific threshold chosen reflects a tradeoff between protecting against narrow, contested decisions and avoiding gridlock where legitimate, broadly beneficial changes become difficult to pass at all.
Examples
- A DAO might require only a simple majority for routine grant proposals, but a two-thirds supermajority for any proposal to modify the DAO's own core governance rules.
- A higher supermajority threshold reduces the risk of a narrow, contested majority pushing through a highly consequential change, at the cost of making legitimate changes harder to pass.