Introduction

Intro to Lil-Nouns

Nouns are an experimental attempt to improve the formation of on-chain avatar communities. While projects such as Cryptopunks have attempted to bootstrap digital community and identity, Nouns attempt to bootstrap identity, community, governance, and a treasury that can be used by the community. An expansion DAO based on Nouns DAO, Lil Nouns DAO works to create a new layer within the Nouns ecosystem; Nouns as kids. By expanding the ecosystem, Lil Nouns DAO aims at exposing more people to Nouns.

• One Lil Noun is born and trustlessly auctioned every 15 minutes, forever.
• 100% of Lil Noun auction proceeds are trustlessly sent to the Lil Nouns treasury.
• One Lil Noun is equal to one vote.

Brief about Lil Noun DAO

Lil Nouns DAO utilizes Nouns DAO's fork of Compound Governance and is the main governing body of the Lil Nouns ecosystem. The Lil Nouns DAO treasury receives 100% of ETH proceeds from daily Lil Noun auctions. Each Lil Noun is an irrevocable member of Lil Nouns DAO and entitled to one vote in all governance matters. Lil Noun votes are non-transferable (if you sell your Lil Noun the vote goes with it) but delegatable, which means you can assign your vote to someone else as long as you own your Lil Noun.

Voting activity

Every Lil-Noun holder is eligible to vote on the proposals and every NFT has the same vote power, that is, there are no extra weightage for rare NFTs. 1 NFT = 1 vote. The proposals can be found on the DAO website here.. There have been a total of 20 proposals that have been active since the inception of the NFT.

NOTE : In addition to the precautions taken by Compound Governance, Lil Nounders have given themselves a special veto right to ensure that no malicious proposals can be passed while the Lil Noun supply is low. This veto right will only be used if an obviously harmful governance proposal has been passed, and is intended as a last resort.

Lil Nounders will proveably revoke this veto right when they deem it safe to do so. This decision will be based on a healthy Lil Noun distribution and a community that is engaged in the governance process.

Referece

Objective

In this article, we aim to analyse the voting activity on Lil Nouns proposals. In specific we look at the types of holder and analyse the behaviour of different user types. Since voting is on chain and costs gas, are smaller holders excluded from the voting process?

Methodology

To identify votes, we use the fact_event_logs table from the ethereum database. The voter, the proposalid, the vote, and the number of votes are present in the event_input column. The contract address is 0x5d2c31ce16924c2a71d317e5bbfd5ce387854039. We define the user type as

• when balance < 1 and balance > 0 then 'shrimp (0-1)'
• when balance < 10 and balance >= 1 then 'crab (1-10)'
• when balance < 50 and balance >= 10 then 'Octpus (10-50)'
• when balance < 100 and balance >= 50 then 'Fish (50-100)'
• when balance < 500 and balance >= 100 then 'Dolphins (100-500)'
• when balance < 1000 and balance >= 500 then ' Shark (500-1000)'
• when balance < 5000 and balance >= 1000 then ' Whale (1000-5000)'
• when balance >= 5000 then 'Humpback whale (5000+)'

Whale definition

NOTE : Instead of defining whales based on the number of NFTs held, we choose to identify them using the wallet balance.

• Here, We define the small voters as holders with balance less than 500 USD. That is, shrimp + crab + octupus + Fish + Dolphins.
• Medium voters as holders with balance less than 5000 and more than 500. That is Shark + Whale.
• Whales as holders with balance more than 1000 USD. That is, whales+Humpback whales

Analysis

We first start with visualising the user base. Here we attempt to visualise how many whales, fishes,etc.. are there in the user base.

We notice that a majority of our users are whales and Humpback whales. they themselves make up close to 84 % of the user base. while medium users make up about 13 % and the rest 2-3 % are small users.

Total votes breakup

We now visualise the votes breakup. That is, out of all votes ever cast on lil nouns, how many came from little voters, how many came from whales etc.

We notice that the whales have clearly outperformed the rest. About 92% of the votes cast have come from whales. while the small voters have indeed been under represented.

Trend of votes.

We have seen that the whales have clearly been very active on proposal voting. But let us now look at the trend over time. That is the share of little votes over proposal numbers.

Though the numbers are small, it appears that the trend is increasing. That is the percentage of votes on a proposal being from a small voter is increasing day by day. ( or rather proposal by proposal) which is a good sign that the DAO is being less and less controlled by the whales.

We also now look at the share of whale voting

Though the share is huge, it appears that the trend is decreasing. That is the percentage of votes on a proposal being from a whale voter is decreasing day by day. ( or rather proposal by proposal) which is a good sign that the DAO is being less and less controlled by the whales.

Conclusion

While the share of votes coming from whales is unusually high, it has been reducing over proposal which is a good sign for the DAO.