Methodology

For Terra and Anchor protocols, the information of which addresses voted can be obtained from the gov_vote tables for each schema.

For Mirror protocol, this information needs to be searched in the terra.msgs table. The value of the parameter msg_value:contract in this table needs to match with the smart contract address from Mirror governance, which can be looked for in the terra.labels table. The Anchor Smart contract can also be found with this method.

Using CTE, I create one table per protocol to obtain all addresses holding each of the protocol tokens as of February 14th, and order these addresses by balance in USD in descending order to identify the whales for each token.

I will define a whales as:

• Top 1000 addresses holding LUNA will be considered whales

• Top 50 addresses holding ANC will be considered whales

• Top 20 addresses holding MIR will be considered whales

The justification for these definitions will be done in the results section.

Using a similar approach as above, I create one table per protocol where I filter all the distinct addreses which voted in the last 90 days in at least one protocol and use an INNER JOIN to add the balance in the governance token as of February 14th. These three tables can be then merged using a UNION. Then, using the input from the whale definition, namely amount of wallets considered whales and balance in usd to be considered as such, I will calculate the parameters required in the bounty.

While separating the protocols gives more insight of the different trends on each one, it doesn't account for the fact the same address can hold all three tokens, vote on all three governance proposal and even be defined as a whale in all three protocols.

Also worth noting is that the balances used to define whales are both liquid and staked. Since the address balance needs to be define in a certain timeframe, it makes little sense to make a distinction between staked and liquid because whales (or any address) can stake to vote for a certain proposal and unstake afterwards. By not differentiating I intend to visualize the address's balances independant of their stake/unstake strategies.

Results

The charts below show:

• both smart contract addresses for Mirror and Anchor Governance
• the number of addresses that hold each token and the number of addresses that correspond to 1%
• the number of wallet considered whales and the balance to be considered as such for each token
• number of addresses that voted in any of the protocols governance proposals with the additional information of how many of them where whales and the percentage of whales in voters and holders

Conclusion

Anchor and Mirror protocols engage their holders in governance votes more than Terra protocol, between 3-4 times more.

Whales are equally engaged in voting for Anchor and Mirror protocols as holders.

Terra whales vote more that Terra holders, they can compare to Anchor and Mirror protocol in terms of participation.

Also note mentioning that, in my opinion, these participation numbers are a bit low since these are considered decentralized protocols (at least Anchor and Mirror are actively promoted as such) and should have higher participation to be more resilient and antifragile.

Introduction

Terra Protocol

The Terra Protocol is a decentralized public blockchain governed by community members. Governance is the democratic process that allows users and validators to make changes to the Terra protocol. Community members submit, vote, and implement proposals.

Community members vote with their staked Luna. One staked Luna equals one vote. If a user fails to specify a vote, their vote defaults to the validator they are staked to. Validators vote with their entire stake unless specified by delegators. For this reason, it is very important that each delegator votes according to their preferences.

Anchor Protocol

Development and maturization of Anchor Protocol is driven by the Anchor community through democratic governance. Anchor does not contain any admin keys with privileged access. Anchor governance is configured to be the sole authority allowed to apply protocol changes or upgrades.

Governance over Anchor is managed by stakers of Anchor Tokens (ANC). ANC acts as Anchor Protocol's governance token, used to vote on polls. Voting power is given proportional to the vote's amount of staked ANC. Voters are able to allocate a specific amount of voting power in staked ANC, capped by their total amount of ANC staked. Voters with a higher ANC stake are therefore given a greater degree of influence in deciding whether to apply the changes listed in a governance poll.

Mirror Protocol

Governance is the democratized process through which proposals for change in Mirror Protocol are introduced and accepted by the community through voting.

There are no admin keys with privileged access. After the initial bootstrapping of contracts, the Gov contract is set to be the owner of the Mirror Protocol contracts and all changes must be made through the governance.

The Mirror Token (MIR) serves as Mirror Protocol's governance token. Only users with a staked MIR position can vote on polls, and each user receives voting power weighted by their amount of staked MIR. For every poll, a user can choose to allocate up to their total staked MIR. Users with higher MIR stake will therefore have more influence when deciding in governance polls.

Summary

All three protocols (Terra, Anchor and Mirror) allow users with staked tokens (LUNA, ANC and MIR) to vote on proposal as part of the protocol's governance.

This 1% of the addresses will be used as the starting point for the whale definition. Since 1% of the addresses corresponds to relatively low balances in usd per token, especially for ANC and MIR, I will iterate by reduncing the amount of wallets.

For the first iteration, I chose wallet number so that the balance considered to be whale was around 0.8M USD. This is in my opinion a bit inaccurate due to the difference in market cap of the three tokens. The second iteration results in the final definition aiming at round and nice numbers and balances that compensate in some way the market cap (not a proportional calculation)

This final charts shows the statistics of the holders-voters-whales set-up:

• 121/7/2 whales voted in at least one Terra/Anchor/Mirror governance proposal in the past 90 days

• This corresponds to 12.1%/14%/10% of the whales

• By calculating the percentage of holders and voters that are whales, we can see that these values are pretty much the same for Anchor and Mirror and almost 4 times bigger for Terra, meaning whales participate more in voting compared to their weight in address distribution.

• Also interesting is the percentage of holders that vote, being Anchor the protocol which engages more holders to vote, followed by Mirror and with a significant difference Terra is in last place.