What is Anchor Poll 18?

Anchor Poll 18 proposes a new earn rate schedule for Anchor Earn, whereby the current 19.56% APY would stay the same for small to medium-sized users but decrease for large users. Those depositing between 100,000 to 500,000 UST would receive a 17.5% APY, while those depositing above 500,000 UST would receive a 10% APY. This change is meant to bring down the overall Anchor APY and promote sustainability for the protocol.

The Yes voters initially had the lead by number of votes, although No voters quickly caught up and outmatched them, especially in the last hour of March 10th and first few hours of March 11th, where a tremendous number of No votes came in. Currently only 16.38%, or about 18 million ANC have voted Yes, while 55.84%, or about 63 million ANC have voted No.

Let's now investigate the age of ANC holdings for Yes voters. To determine the number of days a Yes voter had been holding ANC, we found the difference between March 10th, the day Poll 18 began, and the first day in the past two months their wallet had at least 10% of the ANC used to vote on Poll 18. We chose 10% because we did not want to count a very small amount of ANC as the first day they began holding ANC, but rather when the address began accumulating a more significant amount, such as an amount that could sway a vote.

We only looked at wallet balance data going back two months, so the maximum average number of days would have been 60. Interestingly, this average is not closer to the maximum of 60, suggesting that many Yes voters began accumulating ANC in their wallets over the last month. Let's investigate further by looking at the breakdown below.

Methodology

Most Yes voters acquired their ANC in the 10 to 20 days leading up to the vote. Only about 14% of Yes voters acquired their ANC over two months before the vote, and over 50% of voters acquired ANC in the month leading up to the vote.

By far the highest volume of ANC came from Yes voters who acquired their ANC in the 10 days leading up to Poll 18. Of the 18 million ANC that voted Yes, a staggering 16.6 million, or over 90%, came from this segment of very new ANC holders. Only about 8% came from voters who had been holding their ANC for over two months.

4 of the top 5 Yes voters by ANC balance acquired their ANC only 6 days before the vote.

Conclusion

Over 50% of Yes votes came from users that acquired ANC in the month leading up to Poll 18, and over 90% of the Yes ANC volume came from users that acquired ANC in the 10 days leading up to the poll. In addition, 4 of the top 5 Yes voters by ANC balance acquired their ANC only 6 days before the vote. This data suggests there was a coordinated effort to purchase massive quantities of ANC in order to sway the vote of Poll 18 towards Yes.