Lil Nouns, as a fork of Nouns, is a generative non-fungible token (NFT) project on the Ethereum blockchain. Like Nouns, Lil Nouns are 32x32 pixel characters based on people, places, and things. A Lil noun is generated and auctioned every 15 minutes. Each Lil Nouns has 1 voting power and holders can direct the treasury with their voting ability. Lil Nouns can create and vote on governance proposals, which execute transactions on the Ethereum blockchain when they are approved.

Lil Nouns DAO’s treasury utilizes proposals to benefit the long-term growth and prosperity of the project. A proposal is one or more transactions to be executed by the Lil Nouns DAO contract. Proposals can range from funding addresses to more complex structures that interact with other contracts.

As votes register on-chain and each of them costs transaction fees, not all the holders tend to participate in each proposal. Besides that, each proposal has a quorum threshold of at least 10% yes-votes of the total minted Lil Nouns at the time of proposing. As the number of Lil Nouns continues to increase every 15 minutes, each proposal in the DAO requires more engagement from the Lil Noun holders to be decided.

In this analysis, the governance participation of Lil Noun holders in the proposed proposals of the Nouns DAO has been evaluated.

The required data for this analysis were collected from the fact_event_logs and fact_blocks tables of the core schema of the ethereum database. It should be mentioned that the content and methods of this analysis were highly influenced by the previously submitted dashboards of Lil Nouns Voting Activity and Lil Nouns Secondary Sales Activity by the author. The methods used to extract minting and voting data have been explained in full detail in those reference dashboards.

In conclusion, the analysis of on-chain voting the proposals of for Nouns DAO has indicated that although the quorum threshold of each proposal has increased with the increasing number of Lil Nouns and also has increased the number of votes voted by the Lil Noun holders for each proposal, their engagement and participation ratio has stayed relatively the same. While the number of votes has increased for each proposal, when compared to the required threshold or the number of minted Lil Nouns, it has just been in the same range for old proposals as well as new ones.

Every proposal in the Nouns DAO has gone through different stages. At first and after they were proposed, if there have been other active proposals, they were queued to not interfere or over-crowd the current proposals. After that and if they were not canceled due to external reasons, they become active and the voting process begins. Ultimately, based on the number of votes for and against each proposal, and considering the quorum threshold to be passed, the outcome of each proposal will be determined as either defeated or accepted to be executed. In the following charts, the number of votes registered for each proposal has been compared with the number of minted Lil Nouns at the time of a proposal being proposed and the quorum threshold of that particular proposal. The quorum threshold has been 10% of the total number of minted Lil Nouns which will be increased as the DAO progresses through its next proposals. This in turn has resulted in a more number of votes required for each proposal and a higher engagement in terms of the number of pure votes for each proposal. As it can be seen in the charts, proposals number 21 and 22 had the highest number of votes with more than 500 votes each.

To measure the engagement and participation ratio, first, the start block and the quorum threshold of each proposal were selected from the fact_event_logs table using the ProposalCreatedWithRequirements event. Then, using the fact_block table, the proposed time of each proposal was extracted. Ultimately, the minting data were joined with the resulting data to calculate the number of minted Lil Nouns at the time when each proposal was proposed. Two ratios of the number of votes over the number of minted Lil Nouns and the number of votes over the quorum threshold were measured as indications of user engagement.

Dividing the number of votes by both the quorum threshold and the number of minted Lil Nouns has resulted in two ratios that were used as indications of user engagement and participation in the governance of the DAO. Among the defeated proposals, only 25% of them were registered the required number of votes and defeated by the sheer number of against votes. The other 75% had not even reached the required threshold and thus were defeated as a result. On the other hand, the accepted and executed proposals had seen a proper amount of engagement from the voters by registering the number of votes around the double quorum threshold, especially the recent proposals. The first proposals had only had votes slightly higher than the threshold. Compared to the number of minted Lil Nouns, the votes have only accounted for around 20% of the total minted NFTs at maximum. Besides proposal number 2 as the first executed proposal, only proposals number 15 and 22 had an engagement ratio of above 20%. Nevertheless, it can be seen that in the recent proposals the engagement was increased to values between 15-20 percent compared to the early proposals.