Sometimes we forget what DEFI stands for. Or atleast tend to ignore how important being decentralized is for keep this space up and running. Most of the tokens we are seeing and hearing about in CT are Governancce Tokens. They are solely invented to give the holders to participate in governance decisions of the protocol. I know... It's not just us, the users; It's also the builders and investors that convey this perception.

Today we are taking Aave protocol as an example of DEFI governance; To see how things look from the inside, how can you get involved with Aave votings and what obstacles you may confront in this path.

Hope you stay with me till the end, and support my effort by liking and sharing of this analysis.

First of all, You'll get to know how can you participate in Aave governance actions. Through learning this process, you get to know:

• Who are the top 15 Delegates of AAVE token voting power?
• How many vote have they submitter On-chain?
• Are the delegates the only governance actors of Aave? how regular users are participating in governance?
• Comparing various activity traces of regular voters and delegates in 180 and 90 days timeframe.
• Are gas and transaction fees an obstacle in the way of governance participation?
• Are Aave governance participants also active in other protocols governance?

In DEFI (Decentralized Finance) users and community are the potential owners of the protocol. This means that they can implement their will through exercising their voting power which comes from holding the governance token of the protocol. But doing this requires a great amount of time and energy (assuming having the technological merit) which not everybody does; Also, There are many protocols that you may want to participate on their governance and this makes it a fairly impossible job to do.

This is where the concept of delegation comes in. Delegation refers to act of delegating your voting power (originated from the tokens you hold) to another wallet that guarantees honest representation and constant participation in governance. Delegates are usually informed and active members (Or team) of the community.

SQL Guide

I haven't used anything fancy, just simple query to filter delegation transactions for AAVE Token Contract 0x7fc66500c84a76ad7e9c93437bfc5ac33e2ddae9 and Event_name = DelegateChanged from new Ethereum core Table Fact_decoded_logs

I took adventage of using flipside prepared table of ethereum.aave.ez_votes for submitted Aave votes, and joined them to Fact_Transactions to calculate Gas & Fee.

I've also used EZ_snapshot table to find other protocols that Aave governance participators are playing an active role

Now that you are familiar with basic governance concepts, let's get to work, setting Aave protocol as the base practice field:

Everything you need to know about Aave Governance is in this link. But to participate in governance you need to launch the app and go to Governance Tab. If you are holding AAVE or stAAVE tokens in your wallet, you now are eligible to take part in Aave governance.

This is where you decide to take part by yourself of delegate your voting power to another wallet. Delegation is an On-chain procces, meaning that you need to sign a transaction and pay transaction fee to set the new delegate, but the action in not irreversible; You can delegate your power to another wallet or to yourself, whenever you want.

Now begins the fun Part!

To make this analysis more practical in terms of educating DEFI concepts IRT, I've seperated all the information into two variable, namely, Regular Voters and Delegates.

This should give you a good understanding of the trends among each category, also differences and similarities between them.

How have i defined the delegates though?

I've set the minimum bar to 3 delegated wallets, meaning that to be recognized as a delegate, the wallet should have been chosen as delegatee at least by 3 distinct delegators.

This is not perfect indeed. it may fail to exclude regular voters who had changed their voting powers many times between themselves and other wallets. But it also excludes those wallets that are probably regular voters that changed their opinion about delegating a few times, Or ones that holding assets in different wallets but are delegating their power to another wallet of theirs to reduce fee cost.

In the first chart, on the right of this box, you can see 15 delegates with the most delegated wallets and their respective number of votes. There are only 3 delegate that their number of votes are more than number of delegated wallets, which means that they are not exactly a good delegate to trust.

Since delegation is an On-chain action, in charts below I've shown how the distribution of delegation counts look like. Since most addresses have been chosen as delegate by 1 or 2 distinct wallets, the first chart looks a bit disfigured (and since being chosen 1 or 2 time doesn't make you a established delegate). So I've excluded the first category in second chart to make it more valuable and sensible.