Introduction

Lil Nouns is an expansion to the Nouns DAO project. A Noun NFT is generated and auctioned every 24 hours, and up to date, 344 Nouns have been minted. Proceeds from sales are deposited to the Nouns DAO treasury, and it's Noun holders that govern it. The current floor price on the secondary market for this collection is 94 ETH, and the last Noun was minted for 84 ETH. Lil Nouns attempts to expand the Nouns ecosystem by minting a Lil Noun every 15 minutes, which increases supply, and thus a lower entry price is achieved.

Lil Nouns are generated randomly based on an equally likely selection of traits, such that all Lil Nouns are equally rare. These traits are the background, body, head, accessory, and glasses. Moreover, each Lil Noun is granted voting power on Lil Nouns DAO proposals, which are on-chain, such that one Lil Noun equals one vote.

Methods

We seek to answer the question of whether smaller Lil Nouns holders are generally excluded from voting in proposals due to the high cost of gas that voting on-chain entails. We assess this by looking at the following metrics:

• Lil Nouns holders distribution by the number of tokens held by each wallet. We get the holders information on the collection from the ethereum.core.ez_nft_transfers, such that the last wallet to whom each NFT in the collection was transferred is the current holder. We account for mint, sales, and transfers since all appear in the NFT transfers table. The contract for the Lil Nouns collection is 0x4b10701bfd7bfedc47d50562b76b436fbb5bdb3b.

• Segmented the holder distribution information in ranges of NFTs held, such that we count the number of wallets holding on those ranges.

• Percentage of holders voting on proposals, divided by holder segments. Voting information is obtained from interactions with the DAO contract (0x5d2c31ce16924c2a71d317e5bbfd5ce387854039), such that events in the ethereum.core.fact_event_logs are labeled as a VoteCast.

• Daily votes on proposals by segment and normalized daily votes on proposals by segment.

Analysis

We see that there is a small number of big whales holding many of the tokens. There are also some holders of 10 or more Lil Nouns, but the majority of the Lil Nouns DAO hold either 1 or 2 NFTs.

We can better observe the trend described above on this chart, where we see that although some wallets hold many NFTs, most of them hold just 1.

In contrast to the percentage of holders by segment, we can see that the participation rate is higher in wallets that hold many NFTs than it is in those that hold 1 or 2. Interestingly, the 3 wallets that hold more than 100 NFTs have not voted on any proposal.

On the charts above, we can see that although a significant amount of the votes are from people with 1 or 2 NFTs, they don't make up for all the wallets that hold that amount of NFTs.

Conclusion

We have seen that the participation rate of holders of many Lil Nouns NFTs is much higher than that of smaller holders. This may be because of the high price of voting on-chain in Ethereum, or it may as well be because users that have many NFTs are more involved in the DAO, while those with 1 or 2 may simply hold an NFT and not stay on top of the project.

Contact data

Thank you for reading!

For any questions or feedback feel free to contact me on Discord at CarlOwOs#4288 or Twitter at @CarlOwOs1