Voting Hotkey

A voting hotkey lets you vote from a second principal you control — for example a session identity you get from another dApp, interface, or signer — while the vote still counts exactly as if you had voted yourself: your Voting Power, your ballot, your effect on the result. Your main (stake-holding) account is called the owner; the second principal is the hotkey.

Think of it like a spare key that can only do one thing: cast your vote. It cannot move your tokens, create proposals, change your locks, or touch anything else — only vote, and only as you.

Why use a hotkey

Vote without exposing your main key. Your Voting Power comes from locked tokens held under your main account. With a hotkey you can keep that main identity offline and vote from a throwaway session principal in whatever app you happen to be using.
Vote from anywhere. The hotkey can be any principal you control from any interface or signer — so a campaign DAO is no longer tied to one website. You can vote on a campaign’s DAO using a principal obtained from any dApp, not only the launcher.

Where it works

Hotkeys work on both kinds of OhShii DAO:

ONS — the OhShii ecosystem DAO (you vote there with locked OHSHII), and
each campaign’s SONS DAO — the per-campaign DAO (you vote there with that campaign’s locks).

Each DAO keeps its own separate list of hotkeys. A hotkey you register on ONS is not automatically a hotkey on a campaign DAO, and a hotkey on one campaign is not a hotkey on another. If you want the same principal to vote for you on several DAOs, you register (and later accept) it on each DAO separately.

You can register up to 3 hotkeys per account, per DAO.

Registering a hotkey: the two-step handshake

Setting up a hotkey takes two signatures — one from each of your two identities — so that nobody can attach your principal to someone else’s account without your say-so.

You (the owner) register the hotkey. Connect with your main account and enter the principal you want to use as a hotkey. This creates a pending request — it does not activate anything yet.
The hotkey accepts. Connect with the hotkey’s own identity (in the same DAO) and press Accept. Because the accept is signed by the hotkey itself, this proves you actually control that principal. Only after this second step does the hotkey start voting on your behalf.

That second step is the safety mechanism: since the hotkey must accept with its own signature, no one can bind your principal as their hotkey without your consent — and no one can attach themselves to your account to borrow your Voting Power, because you (the owner) have to propose the pairing first. Both sides must agree.

The accept step is per DAO: on a campaign (SONS) DAO you select the DAO, connect the hotkey identity, and accept there.

A pending request that is never accepted expires on its own after about 24 hours. Either side can also clear it sooner — the owner can cancel a request they created, and the named principal can decline a request that points at it.

Cancelling, removing, and resigning

Nothing here is permanent — a hotkey pairing can always be undone, and taking it apart is never harder than setting it up:

Cancel a pending request — before it’s accepted, the owner can cancel it (and the named principal can decline it).
Remove a hotkey — the owner can remove any of their hotkeys at any time.
Resign — the hotkey itself can step down at any time.

All of these take effect immediately.

How a hotkey vote works

When a hotkey votes:

The vote is recorded under the owner’s account, using the owner’s Voting Power.
It also uses the owner’s identity verification — so the hotkey never has to verify its own identity (with World ID or DecideID) just to cast your ballot. The personhood check is satisfied by you, the owner.
The vote shows a “via hotkey” indicator, so it’s transparent that the ballot was cast through a hotkey (and which one), even though it counts for the owner.

One vote per proposal — you can’t vote twice or exceed the cap

Your account and all of its hotkeys act as a single voter. On any one proposal, the whole group casts at most one ballot, and that ballot is capped at your account’s Voting Power:

If the owner and a hotkey both try to vote on the same proposal, the second one is turned away with “Already voted.”
If several hotkeys try to vote on the same proposal, only the first is recorded.

So you can never use multiple hotkeys — or the owner plus a hotkey — to vote more than once or to push past your Voting-Power cap.

Your hotkey’s own locks are dormant

If the principal you registered as a hotkey happens to hold its own OHSHII or campaign locks, that Voting Power does not count while it is registered as your hotkey. Everything that principal does at the ballot resolves to you, using your Voting Power — its own stake sits dormant.

To actually use that principal’s own stake, remove it as a hotkey and vote from it directly. Once it’s no longer your hotkey, it votes as itself with its full Voting Power — voting directly does require that principal to complete its own identity verification.

Counting a hotkey’s own stake toward yours — without removing it and without re-verifying — is not available today. In the future the DAO could vote to add such a feature; it does not exist yet, so for now a hotkey’s own stake stays dormant while it is registered.

Hotkeys and vote delegation don’t mix

A principal is either a voting hotkey or a participant in Liquid Democracy (following a delegate, or acting as a delegate) — not both. A registered hotkey cannot follow anyone and cannot accept followers, and a principal already involved in delegation cannot be registered as a hotkey. (Your main account is unrestricted — you can delegate or accept followers as usual; only the hotkey principal itself is limited to voting.)

Guardian override rounds need the owner in person

Some critical proposals can be paused by a guardian’s veto, which opens a community override round. Voting in an override round requires a fresh identity check for that specific round, and that check is tied to whoever performs it.

Because of that, a hotkey can vote in an override round only if you, the owner, personally complete the fresh check for that round from your main account. The launcher will tell you when the owner account needs to attest — it will never try to run the fresh check from the hotkey identity, since that would be the wrong person.

Quick reference

Action	Who does it	Notes
Register a hotkey	Owner (main account)	Creates a pending request; nothing is active yet
Accept	The hotkey, with its own identity	Proves control; activates the hotkey (per DAO)
Cancel a pending request	Owner (or the named principal declines)	Before acceptance; pending requests also expire after ~24h
Remove a hotkey	Owner	Takes effect immediately
Resign	The hotkey	Takes effect immediately
Vote	The hotkey	Counts as the owner: owner’s Voting Power, owner’s verification, “via hotkey” shown

Related: Voting · Liquid Democracy