Who's Voting

A breakdown of recent governance proposals

Now that the NNS governance rules have changed to emphasize participation in governance proposals, let’s see who is voting on these governance proposals.

Unknown Neurons

Before diving deep into the analysis, remember that there exists unknown neurons (neurons whose ids are not known by ICA’s dashboard or ic.rocks) and that I don’t have data on these unknown neurons. Unknown neurons make up about 28-56% of votes on recent governance proposals. It’s likely that unknown neurons are non-genesis and consist of many small neurons (by ICP) as well as the massive neurons from the 31DEC staking event. I have a proposal in the dfinity forum to hopefully resolve the unknown neuron issue (please add your feedback!). The remainder of this article will focus on known neurons, unless otherwise specified.

Who is voting?

dfinity and ICA started voting on governance proposals recently (starting on proposal 46037) and their inclusion gives a nice three legged stool for governance. Leg 1 is non-genesis neurons (the two blank columns below) which comprise about 33M votes. Leg 2 is dfinity/ICA which comprises 22M votes. Leg 3 is seed and early round investors which cast around 27-32M votes. Outside of this, there’s about 90M votes being cast from unknown neurons (further strengthening my case on why we need neuron indexing to better understand the composition of this voting power).

From the data set it appears that there are 29 distinct seed round investors and 14 early round investors actively participating in governance. There are about 350 non-genesis neurons participating in governance. Again, these numbers are for known neurons only.

One interesting tidbit is that the ICA is only voting with neuron 3000. They also have another 4M in voting power in neurons 3001-3004 that haven’t cast a vote yet.

For this analysis I’ve assumed neurons 2000, 2001, 2010 and 4017 - 4037 are controlled by dfinity, although that hasn’t been proven yet.

What about #8YearGang?

The bulk (greater than 50%) of votes cast are coming from 8-year neurons with the remainder of the voting power coming from neurons with less than 4 year dissolve delays. The majority of the voting power for 2 or less year dissolve delays are the dfinity-owned neurons 4017-4031.

Similar behavior exists for dissolving or not-dissolving neurons, with the bulk of the voting power coming from locked neurons. Dfinity’s neurons 4017-4031 make up the majority of dissolving voting power, which means dfinity’s influence over governance topics is decreasing rapidly over time.

What about whales?

Let’s look at vote casting for proposal 47098 and group by created date, which is an easy way to identify potential whales. Dfinity is currently the largest active NNS participant by voting power with 21M vp, however as stated above, that power is decreasing. Next are two neurons created on 21JAN22 that combine for almost 21M vp and an additional two 21JAN22 neurons for 5M vp. From there you can see a sharp decrease in voting power by whales, one that disbursed mainly between seed round investors and post-genesis investors.

Conclusion

I’ve often said that the NNS is the world’s largest DAO and is setting the gold standard for DAO governance activity. It’s phenomenal to see the change in the first 9-months of the NNS and I’m excited to see the NNS move towards more decentralization, longer term horizons and increased voter participation. I’m thrilled by the voting participation from seed round investors and the number of smaller neuron holders who are voting manually or have updated their neurons to follow a voting neuron. I have seen that ~6M votes are cast when the ICPMN neuron casts a vote and ~1M votes are cast when the ICDevs neuron casts a vote. Cycle_dao also seems to have >1M votes following it, however I haven’t been able to pin down a good estimate. All of this is progress in the right direction. We still have a long way to go to full decentralization (see the whale conversation above), full transparency (neuron indexing will help) and improved voter participation (would be nice to get to >90%), but we are certainly moving in the right direction.

In the next article I will explore what known neurons are doing with their rewards, particularly voting neurons who are receiving increased maturity.