Hosting Decentralized Voting Records on IPFS: Web3 DAOs

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are designed to enable transparent, collective decision-making. But in reality, DAO voting often lacks the permanence and accessibility it promises. While off-chain tools help reduce costs and friction, the underlying records are often fragile, undocumented, or easily lost.

If we care about trustless governance, we need trustless, persistent record-keeping. That’s where IPFS comes in.

The Real Problem: DAO Voting Records Are Fragile

Governance isn’t just about casting votes — it’s about being able to prove what happened, when, and how. If vote records are stored in GitHub repos, spreadsheets, or single-platform interfaces, they’re vulnerable to loss, manipulation, or unintentional erasure.

The 2022 Beanstalk exploit, where manipulated governance led to a $182M loss, reminds us how high the stakes can be when vote records aren’t transparent or auditable.

Even DAOs using Snapshot or Aragon face risks:

• Metadata is stored off-chain
• IPFS references may not be pinned
• Public availability isn’t guaranteed

If no one maintains these records, they’ll eventually vanish — along with the proof of how governance decisions were made.

Why DAOs Use IPFS for Voting Records

IPFS gives DAOs a way to store proposal metadata, vote signatures, and tallies in a verifiable, tamper-proof, and transparent way. Once content is uploaded, it receives a content identifier (CID) that cryptographically proves its contents.

Snapshot, for example, uses IPFS to store proposal payloads off-chain. This allows DAOs to run gasless votes while maintaining auditability. The result is a blend of performance and transparency — but only if records are properly pinned.

The problem: IPFS isn’t persistent by default.

• If no nodes are pinning the data, it disappears
• Gateways alone don’t guarantee reliability
• DIY pinning strategies are often neglected

DAOs assume “putting it on IPFS” means it’s permanently available. It’s not. Without infrastructure, it’s just peer-to-peer hope.

How DAOs Actually Use IPFS: Aragon and Gitcoin

Aragon: Bridging On-Chain and Off-Chain Governance

Aragon Network DAO stores proposals, voting tallies, and decision metadata on IPFS and links them to on-chain outcomes using CIDs. This hybrid model allows DAOs to combine flexibility (off-chain text) with verifiability (on-chain references).

Aragon leverages IPFS to ensure that the full context of a governance decision is preserved: proposals include structured metadata like timestamps, authorship, rationale, and voting parameters. These records are referenced in on-chain smart contracts that determine execution, meaning that even if the frontend changes or disappears, the record itself can still be independently verified by anyone with the CID.

Their platform also supports multiple governance modules—like optimistic governance and dispute resolution—each of which depends on a reliable and immutable record layer.

Key takeaway: Aragon succeeds because it stores the full context — proposal text, timestamps, parameters — not just the final vote result. IPFS enables this, but the durability of those records depends entirely on active pinning.

Gitcoin DAO: Powering Open Grant Data with IPFS

Gitcoin’s Grants Data Portal provides open, serverless, local-first access to curated datasets about donations, projects, and governance processes. The project has become a Schelling point for permissionless data around Gitcoin Grants and related ecosystems.

The portal uses IPFS to publish .parquet files from transformed datasets, supporting use cases like clustering analysis, Sybil resistance research, and cross-community collaboration. The backend pipeline is built with Dagster, dbt, and DuckDB, and it pushes outputs to IPFS for decentralized access.

In a recent grant proposal, Gitcoin requested funding to improve the portal's infrastructure and accessibility. The proposal includes a Filebase subscription to ensure consistent IPFS pinning and data availability, recognizing the need for reliability alongside decentralization.

Key takeaway: Gitcoin’s data team understands that decentralization without persistence isn’t enough. Their inclusion of Filebase in the grant budget reflects the growing awareness that reliable pinning is essential to making IPFS production-ready for governance.

Making IPFS Voting Records Production-Ready with Filebase

DAOs need persistence, not just decentralization. That’s where Filebase helps:

• Dedicated IPFS pinning so vote data doesn’t vanish
• High-performance gateways for global, instant access
• Bare metal infrastructure — no surprise downtimes
• Simple API and SDK integrations integrate with modern tools

Filebase supports DAOs that treat their governance records like long-term infrastructure, not disposable data.

DAO Vote Archival Best Practices

If you're implementing decentralized governance, here's how to treat voting records seriously:

1. Structure Records for Auditability

Include:

• Snapshot block references
• Full proposal metadata (not just IDs)
• Voting parameters (quorum, thresholds)
• Cryptographic proofs

2. Plan a Pinning Strategy

• Use at least one dedicated pinning provider
• Maintain backups on secondary infra
• Verify pin health and CID availability regularly

3. Distribute Access

• Avoid reliance on public gateways
• Mirror records across geographies
• Share CIDs with the community and archive tools

Wrapping Up

Strong governance isn't just about casting votes—it's about being able to look back and know exactly what happened. That means keeping records that are verifiable, transparent, and built to last.

IPFS offers a powerful way to store that data, but it's not magic. Without a solid pinning strategy, those records can disappear. That's why DAOs need to treat their off-chain infrastructure with the same care they give to their smart contracts.

Filebase helps with the heavy lifting—keeping your data online, available, and reliable—so you can focus on building a better system for everyone involved.

Related Reading

If you're new to IPFS or want a deeper dive into how it actually works under the hood, check out our recent article: IPFS Storage Explained: How It Works. It’s a great primer on the mechanics behind the storage layer powering DAO governance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why should DAOs use IPFS for voting records?
A: IPFS provides verifiable, tamper-proof storage that ensures voting records can be trusted and independently audited — even when stored off-chain.

Q: Is storing vote data on IPFS enough to make it permanent?
A: No. IPFS doesn’t guarantee persistence by default. Without active pinning, records can disappear from the network.

Q: How does Filebase help with DAO record-keeping?
A: Filebase provides dedicated IPFS pinning, fast global gateways, and infrastructure reliability — helping DAOs keep governance data online and verifiable.

Q: What are best practices for storing DAO voting records?
A: Structure your data for long-term audits, use redundant pinning providers, and ensure broad accessibility by distributing CID references across your community.