Overall, although small-scale Lil Noun holders appear to be active voters, the voting power trends toward more concentration in the hands of fewer NFT owners. Moreover, the overall voting participation does not appear perfect, although this analysis can be expanded by providing a cumulative count of NFT holders rather than proxying that by counting recipients.

About

This analysis was created by catscatscode (Flipside, Twitter, catscatscode#3578 on Discord) on 21 June 2022 for Flipside Crypto's "Voting Activity" Lil Nouns bounty. This analysis represents the author's best effort at interpreting available data, but it is not financial advice.

Introduction

Lil Nouns are a fork of the Nouns NFT protocol. While with Nouns, a new NFT is minted and auctioned off every day, a new Lil Noun is born every 15 minutes. An auction runs for 15 minutes (extendable by 1m 30sec if a bid is placed at the last minute), and the Lil Noun goes to the top bidder. Lil Nouns founders (multisig) get compensated with every 10th NFT, and NounsDAO gets compensated with every 11th NFT.

Lil Nouns DAO governs the project. Voting on proposals is done on a 1 Lil Noun - 1 vote basis.

Methodology

This article analyzes voting behavior of Lil Noun holders, i.e. VoteCast events sent to the Nouns DAO Proxy 0x5d2c31ce16924c2a71d317e5bbfd5ce387854039 address.

The analysis timeframe begins with the first voting actions for Lil Nouns on 21 May 2022, and ends at the time of the analysis (21 June).

We visualize and analyze:

• the transaction fee vs. the size of voting transaction (number of votes that a wallet submitted),
• average number of votes per voter wallet per day, and
• total voters vs. recipients (the number of recipients is meant to proxy the number of holders, however does not exclude the wallets that sold their Lil Noun, and therefore is higher than the number of actual holders).

Data Results

Most voters are small holders (hold and vote with one or few Lil Nouns, typically less than 10). Based on the visualization below, it appears that even small-scale holders pay a wide variety of gas fees (likely depending on the congestion of the network):

With time, however, voting power for Lil Nouns appears to be concentrating. Each unique voter is voting with a larger number of NFTs:

Compared to the wallets who get a Lil Noun or several Lil Nouns, the number of voters is notably fewer. (The below number of cumulative recipients is, however, an inflated measure of the number of NFT holders, because it does not exclude the users who sold their Lil Noun(s)):