Nouns DAO Governance Participation
Introduction
Nouns DAO is a community built around Nouns profile pictures NFT experimenting with the concepts of community building, identity and governance. The community is programmed to expand itself to infinity and beyond as long as demand exists, with one new Noun being minted and auctioned each day.
The funds collected from the auctions become part of the Nouns DAO Treasury, open for the collective to distribute funds as they see fit. But how do they do that? That’s right, they VOTE.
In this report we will have a closer look at the participation in Nouns DAO Governance proposals.
Methodology
The Nouns started minting back in August 08, 2021
, with the first proposals going live soon after. We are going to need to collect three groups of information for our analysis:
- Nouns
- Proposals
- Votes
Each new Nouns DAO is minted from the Nouns contract address and assigned a unique token_id
. We can keep track of minting events using the ethereum.core.fact_event_logs
table and looking for contract interactions where the minting function is called.
- Nouns Contract:
0x9c8ff314c9bc7f6e59a9d9225fb22946427edc03
- Mint Function Hash:
0x1106ee9d020bfbb5ee34cf5535a5fbf024a011bd130078088cbf124ab3092478
Every 10th Nouns is minted and sent straight to the Multisig wallet of the Nounders, founders of the project that have chosen to reward themselves with Nouns.
Proposals are created through the Nouns DAO Proxy Contract
using the propose
function. The recorded interaction contains the description of the proposal, its unique proposal id, start and end blocks, as well as the proposal threshold and required quorum, all of which we can collect using the ethereum.core.fact_event_logs
table. Specifically, we will be looking for the ProposalCreated
and ProposalCreatedWithRequirements
events.
- Nouns DAO Proxy Contract:
0x6f3e6272a167e8accb32072d08e0957f9c79223d
The number of Nouns that were already minted at the time of each proposal will be calculated using the proposal end block compared to the Noun mint block. All Nouns that were minted before the end block of the proposal will be considered as eligible to participate.
Votes are casted by interacting with the same Nouns DAO Proxy Contract
and using one of the vote functions, castVote
or castVoteWithReason
. The second function allows the voter to submit a note that will be recorded on the blockchain with the vote.
Results
So far there have been 365 Nouns minted, currently held by 222 distinct wallets. Below we can see that as Nouns continued to be minted over time, the number of NFTs being used to vote for proposal kept on increasing until recently.
However, it seems that despite this growth, the number of wallets participating on any given proposal grew only slightly. This indicates that the new Nouns are being accumulated by a core group of DAO members increasing their stake in the organisation. While for the moment it means a continuing stream of income to the Treasury, it sets itself on a path of turning to a DAO of the few.
The minted Nouns participating in governance over time remained somewhat constant. Although with ups and down, there were between 20%-40% of the minted Nouns generally participating. This also goes to show that the users that are most involved in the management of the DAO have remained pretty much the same over time, despite more Nouns continuing to be minted.
Adding a reason to a vote is optional and for the first half of the proposals, it’s been almost never used. For recent proposals however, we can see them having an increasing popularity, with as much as 66% of the casted votes having a reason. This is an encouraging aspect of a healthy governance system, with users putting in extra effort to argument their choice and make sure it lives forever on the blockchain next to their actions.
Proposal 104 is still open at the time of writing and for this reason we will use the highest percentage of reasons for a closed proposal. This leaves us with proposal 57 which we can see in a bit more detail below. A bit over 56% of votes contained a reason and we can see all of them in the table next to the pie chart.
On average, about 26% of the minted Nouns have been used to vote on proposals. Excluding the 7 proposals with no votes, the participation has a bimodal distribution with the two peaks close to each other, at 25% and 23% participation.
The highest participation so far has been of 48%.
tl;dr
- As Nouns continue to be minted, an increasing number of them are being used to vote on proposals. However, the number of wallets using them has changed only slightly, pointing to a concentration of voting power for the DAO.
- Votes are not hijacked by large holders, with wallet and Nouns votes being closely aligned.
- Despite the increase in the number of Nouns, the percentage of the minted tokens being used to vote has remained in the same range over time.
- On average, around a quarter of the minted Nouns have participated in voting.
- Votes are increasingly accompanied by reasons, a sign of healthy governance.
The sliver lining of the situation is that the vote is not hijacked by large holders of Nouns, with the wallet vote option and Nouns votes being closely aligned overall.