Who's Voting: Part 2

Further analysis

I got a lot of questions from my “Who’s Voting” article, mostly focused on:

• Who isn’t voting?

• What are neurons doing with their “extra” rewards?

Who Isn’t Voting

This was an interesting question a lot of people raised after the “Who’s Voting” article. Perhaps it’s more exciting to consider who isn’t voting, particularly because it might give some insight into who isn’t participating in the NNS and what their motives are. Remember, this analysis is limited by the “known neuron” problem I mention in most articles.

For this analysis I looked only at who voted for proposal 47098. Any neurons that voted are considered “voting neurons” for this analysis.

So who isn’t voting? Well, it’s mostly Seed and Early Investors.

As you can see, almost 120M in voting power from seed investors isn’t voting (compared to ~24M that is voting). Even more shocking is that most Early Round investors aren’t voting (50.3M not voting vs. 0.2M voting). The vast majority of non-genesis neurons are voting, which I believe is a sign that the recent push to encourage governance participation within the NNS is working.

Even more shocking is this table:

Notice the amount of non-voting coming from 8-year neurons. This means that there are seed and early round investors who have upped their dissolve delay to 8-years, but are not voting. Perhaps this article should be a wake up call to these investors that their lack of participation in voting (either manually or through following a neuron that is voting) is costing them significant returns on their investments.

What are Neuron Holders Doing With Their Rewards?

I took a snapshot of the NNS on 03FEB and compared it to a snapshot from 03MAR to see how many known neurons are topping up their neurons, particularly after the high rewards from the governance educational time. Out of 15.9k known neurons, 201 have increased the staked ICP in their neuron, either through adding more ICP (“topping up”) or merging maturity. Out of those 201 neurons, 185 were voting neurons (defined above), so it’s clear that voting neurons are more likely to add ICP than non-voting neurons, something we should expect.

What’s interesting is that it doesn’t seem like the biggest of these neurons are using maturity to top up with, but are instead bringing ICP in from other sources, like a crypto exchange. A neuron that was merging maturity only would increase it’s ICP stake by 2-6% during the month of February. However, notice below how the largest increases (in ICP terms) came from neurons increasing their stake by 10% of more. In fact, look at the Early Round investor (it’s most likely one investor) who increased his/her stake by 1800%! And the top neuron increased his/her stake by 233k ICP!

The smaller neurons, those smaller than 5k ICP, tended to have increases closer to 3 or 4%, suggesting the smaller neurons are increasing their stake through merge maturity.

We know that 1M governance rewards were created between 03FEB and 03MAR (either through merge maturity or spawn neuron) and known neurons that I believe to be merging maturity totals around 40k. This means that the remaining 0.996M ICP in governance awards was either spawned neurons or merged maturity in unknown neurons. Unfortunately it’s not possible to tell (until we have neuron id indexing) so we can’t tell whether more neurons are merging their maturity or converting it to ICP through spawned neurons. However, given that known neurons had ~700k ICP in “topped up” ICP and ~1M ICP was newly staked in new neurons in February, it’s likely that the NNS actually took in more ICP in February than left it.

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