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DeepDAO Research: Who votes on Snapshot

Kxp

23-05-02 16:16

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Original title: "DeepDAO Research presents: Hunting Vote Miners"

Original author: DEEPDAO.IO

Original compilation: Kxp, BlockBeats

Recently, a study conducted by DeepDAO found at least a few dozen snapshot spaces voting primarily on proposals that lack any seriousness or action. These DAOs have proposals like "Will BTC drop below $30,000?" or "Is the Crypto market still bullish in Q2 2022?" and "Did you do an airdrop?" "(Nonsensical DAO), the wallet for voting or proposals is called "nonsensical wallet".

These groups often share some common characteristics, such as their voting tokens, space names, and repeated proposal titles. They never provide any context: there is no website, social address, vault, or other minimum necessary to operate the snapshot space.

Governance data for nonsensical DAO and wallet addresses presents a unique network of governance models, which leads us to consider removing their governance actions from DeepDAO's aggregated content , and exclude some voting wallets from our legitimate governance data.

How to identify meaningless DAO

In this article, we will describe the Generic path for API replication of this study. We will also provide a real data example of a nonsensical DAO network.

Step 1: Identify the DAOs to investigate

The easiest way to identify them is Find all organizations that voted for the same token. While this isn't the only way DAOs are grouped, it's certainly a powerful one, and one that's easily tracked in DeepDAO's database. As we observed, there are quite a few organizations that belong to this grouping. For example this, no less than 17 organizations voted for Polygon Matic Token.

Step 2: Scan your identified groups for nonsensical proposals

Scan the organizations' proposals for ones that seem to lack any seriousness or operational significance, such as those mentioned above. Clues given in our API include duplicate proposal titles or token names in proposal titles.

Step 3: Check if the snapshot space names of these DAOs have similar title

For example, we found 17 DAOs whose proposal titles were Polygon or some variation of MATIC. In another case, the DAO title was a variant of AAVE, while the voting token was wMATIC. On the DeepDAO pages of these organizations, you can see all the spaces grouped together.

Step 4: Check for similar ENS domain names registered with meaningless spaces

In the above mentioned Among the cases named after Aave, 12 out of 29 domain names are gitcoin001.eth, gitcoin002.eth, gitcoin012.eth and so on.

In another case (lumao), we found clusters of domain names consisting of 7 and 13 digit ENS.

Tens of thousands of participating wallets

Step 1: Get your Voting and Proposal Frequency of the Meaningful DAO and comparing it to a relevant control group

We compared the average activity of a meaningless DAO named Polygon/MATIC Average activity with all other snapshot DAOs and the top 10% highest voting DAO group.

Research findings:

1. The average vote to voter turnout ratio of these meaningless DAOs All other snapshot spaces were 7x and 10x higher and similar to the top 10% highest voted spaces average.

2. These nonsensical DAOs have on average 3x more proposals and 10x as many proposers than the top 10% highest voted snapshot DAOs. These differences increase to 10x proposals and 39x proposers compared to all other snapshots.

3. While these nonsensical snapshots have a similar percentage of votes to veteran DAO projects, their voting focus is spread across more proposals . In short, their activities are much shallower than those of the top DAOs.

Step 2: Decide where to set the threshold

In other words, meaningless Is DAO activity sufficiently anomalous to be excluded from real DAO behavior data?

In our case:

1. Meaningless DAO turnout Much higher than all other snapshots combined, and its number of proposals is also significantly higher than the top-voted DAO.

2. Thus, we find that the coordination mechanism of these pointless DAOs can manage particularly heavy voting and proposal work among thousands of participant addresses , and distracted it for an extended period of time without any public record, documentation, social space, or visible Tokenomics.

We found this to be sufficient to remove all votes and proposals in these DAOs from our governance totals and DAO participation scores.

Senseless DAO Wallet Voting Pattern

Our research found that, Wallets that vote in pointless DAOs also often vote in DAOs with real snapshot space. Here's how we determined this behavior:

Step 1: Query the DeepDAO database for your Nonsensical wallet's activity in all other DAOs

What do these wallets do other than being pointless wallets? Our main example is the Polygon/MATIC snapshot, and their combined 43,051 voting wallets.

We found that 22,711 nonsensical wallets have voted in at least one legitimate DAO so far, for a total of 507,192 votes in 2,208 different snapshots.

1. Approximately 50% of these votes were cast in 15 well-known project snapshots such as Optimism, Aave, Arbitrum, Stargate, Uniswap, Decentraland, and Ape Coin , and dozens of other identified projects.

2. We also observed that these wallets actively participated in voting in other nonsense spaces.

Step 2: Query the activity data of nonsense wallets in all legitimate snapshot spaces and compare it to all snapshot voters/control groups

1. In our example, the average number of votes for nonsense wallets in other DAOs is 22.31 votes per address, compared to an average of 6.12 votes per snapshot voter 3.5 times higher.

2. Nonsense wallets voted 5.87 other DAOs per address, while all snapshot voters voted 1.71 DAOs on average, 3.4 times higher .

Therefore, each address has a significantly higher turnout rate.

Step 3: Choose a well-known DAO to see if there is a large number of votes in your meaningless wallet

For example, we focused on two DAOs with the most votes from Polygon/MATIC addresses, the Optimism and Arbitrum snapshots. We also considered possible governance incentives. For example, the Arbitrum snapshot proposal was announced as part of its launch event, which resulted in its eligibility for the airdrop; many Optimism proposals require voters to choose between projects that may receive an airdrop and have an impact on their status.

Step 4: Query the voting status of these wallets on the legitimate DAO of your choice, and test whether the value is abnormally high

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Here is an example of our Polygon/MATIC nonsensical space:

Example 1: In Optimism snapshot space (opcollective.eth) Vote on:

1. We studied 1,908 nonsensical wallet addresses that voted on Optimism. Together, these addresses cast 69,194 votes on Optimism’s 93 proposals, covering all proposals from September 6, 2022 to January 18, 2023.

2. Each nonsensical wallet address casts an average of 36.27 votes on opcollective.eth, which is almost three times the DAO's average of 12.91 from a total of 88,657 voters times. A random query of 1,908 Optimism voters showed results that were close to the overall average.

Summary and Outlook

Overall, there seems to be a collective effort here. We do not want to presuppose the motivation behind this before conducting further research, so we will continue to refine and refine our findings. We'll look for more examples of meaningless spaces and explore their activities.

Another ongoing study is comparing the list of wallets we found in these DAOs and after they received airdrops from well-known projects like Optimism and Arbitrum activity.