Pairwise

• Name: Pairwise
• URL: https://www.pairwise.vote/
• Category: ballot-construction governance middleware / pairwise-ranking tool / funding-round decision interface
• Tags: ethereum-ecosystem
• Summary: Pairwise is ballot-construction middleware. Its move is simple: break a long funding or governance ballot into repeated pairwise judgments, then aggregate the results. The real control surface sits upstream of settlement — category design, filtering, delegation, eligibility mapping, anonymity plumbing, and ranking logic.
• What it does:
  • Lets users compare projects or options two at a time instead of ranking a long list in one pass
  • Aggregates those comparisons into ranked outputs using the BudgetBox allocation and ranking method
  • Adds category segmentation and, in some rounds, star-rating steps before finer pairwise ordering
  • Serves as ballot-building tooling for Optimism Retro Funding rounds rather than replacing the host funding rail outright
  • Experiments with category-specific liquid-democracy delegation so users can vote directly in some areas and delegate others
  • In at least one architecture iteration, combines AA wallets, Semaphore proofs, IPFS ballot payloads, and EAS attestations for pseudonymous onchain vote publication
  • Extends beyond Retro Funding into other capital-allocation workflows such as Deep Funding jury comparisons
• Key claims:
  • Pairwise belongs in a narrow ballot-construction bucket, not a generic governance-app bucket. The core product is upstream preference formation.
  • The RF5 materials matter because they show a multi-stage process: star-rating to segment projects, then pairwise comparison inside those buckets. That is more than a prettier ballot UI.
  • The RF4 pseudonymity architecture is the sharpest technical pass. It exposes how eligibility mapping, wallet binding, backend services, and vote publication policy still shape outcomes even when the final artifact lands onchain.
  • The RF6 liquid-democracy experiment shows Pairwise as a routing layer for expertise, not just a ranking widget.
  • The note is useful because it shows how governance tooling can migrate from offchain interface middleware toward hybrid onchain attestation without changing the underlying pairwise-ranking logic.
• Whitepaper: No canonical standalone whitepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official site, official Pairwise posts, live app landing text, and the Metagov interop description collected in ../whitepapers/pairwise-primary-sources-2026-05-11.md.
• Sources:
  • https://www.pairwise.vote/
  • https://app.pairwise.vote/
  • https://paragraph.com/@pairwise/pairwise-in-retro-funding-round-5-your-voting-tool
  • https://paragraph.com/@pairwise/empowering-superchain-with-pseudonymous
  • https://paragraph.com/@pairwise/pairwise-retro-funding-round-6-liquid-democracy-experiment-1
  • https://paragraph.com/@pairwise/deep-funding
  • https://github.com/metagov/interop

Internal linkages

• Best signaling baseline contrast: snapshot.

• Best privacy-heavier voting contrast: maci.

• Best downstream allocation comparison: deep-funding.

• Last reviewed: 2026-05-31 UTC