NEAR Tournament Round 2: Local Government

    Every city has its governors, and the City of NEAR is no different. Assess the state of governance on NEAR, with an eye toward assessing its decentralisation.

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    Introduction

    A good government is a fundamental pillar of a society - whether it is a physical government or a decentralised collection of validator nodes. NEAR’s government takes the form of the second kind, and in this dashboard, I will analyse the state of governance provided by NEAR. I will tackle the following aspects:

    • The daily and the total number of users who delegate and UNdelegate their assets to NEAR validators.
    • The daily and the total number of delegation and UNdelegation transactions to NEAR validators.
    • The daily and the total amount of NEAR delegated per validator, as well as the UNdelegated amounts.
    • The daily average amount of NEAR staked per user.

    Methodology

    I initially hoped to asses particular proposals and deep dive into what users are voting for and at what frequency, however, I came to the realisation that the Meta Vote has not launched yet, meaning that there is no way to access on-chain governance - I was unable to find any direct votes to proposals on Nearscan. Therefore, this dashboard will mostly investigate the delegation/UNdelegation behaviour of users, which in turn will let me assess how decentralised NEAR really is - based on how each validator is doing in comparison to other validators.

    ==Delegation Metrics==

    First up, let’s look at which validators users are delegating the most frequently and the biggest amounts on NEAR.

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    UNdelegation Metrics

    The next step is to investigate which proposals have seen the most undelegation actions, when it comes to the number of users unstaking, the number of unstaking transactions and the amount of NEAR undelegated.

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    Key points:

    • The validators that have seen the most undelegation-related actions are astro-stakers.poolv1.near, nearcrowd.poolv1.near and blackdaemon.poolv1.near.
    • As in the case of delegation behaviour, we can also see some spikes in the average amount of NEAR unstaked per unstaker - which as discussed above, could imply the presence of whales in the government.

    The survival rate of validators

    Lastly, let’s investigate the age of the active - and the inactive validators and see for how long they stayed alive.

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    Conclusion

    This dashboard has looked into the staking and unstaking behaviours of NEAR’s citizens. We have seen which validators have seen the most popularity among NEAR’s citizens; which validators have had the most staking transactions and the most amount of NEAR delegated. We have also looked at the same metrics for the undeleagtion-related behaviour of NEAR’s citizens. By the looks of it, it seems that NEAR is on a very good path to a well-established decentralised government - there are a lot of active validators that continue to see a big number of staking transactions by many stakers on a daily basis. If NEAR picks up the growth in terms of validators and these continue to be supported by average users, the hope for excellent governance still stands!

    This dashboard has been written by Nat. 💙

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    Key points:

    • Aurora.poolv1.near has seen the biggest number of stakers, as well as the biggest number of staking transactions. However, it is interesting to see that it is not the validator with the most amount of NEAR staked - as this title belongs to meta-pool.near.
    • The cumulative sum of the amount of NEAR delegated shows us that the rate at which users are staking their assets has slowed down quite a lot. It could be that in the current bear market users don’t want to be staking with validators, as they have potentially sold their assets - or are potentially waiting until the bear is over so that they can start engaging with validators again.
    • The average amount of NEAR delegated per staker is also a quite interesting insight. We can see some major spikes in the last chart, which could be a sign of the presence of whales. On some days, the average amount staked per staker reaches a few millions - which possibly implies that on those days there were a few massive transactions - which in turn implies the presence of whales. Now, how does this affect the state of decentralisation of NEAR is an open question, but it’s usually not good news to see one whale being in control of a validator, as this is the complete opposite of a decentralised government! However, it’s also good to see that on other days the average is much lower - which implies the presence of normal users, rather than whales.
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