Terra — Governance participation and activities analysis
In the blockchains which use Proof of Stake (PoS) technology, there is one very important field we need to understand, which is the governance. Not matter how decentralized it is, there is still need to do the governance to help run the community. So, in this article, I am going to explore and analyze the governance activity, including the participation in governance activities by address, distribution and the correlation between the distribution and the holdings size. All the data, tool come from Flipside Crypto.
Introduction
Here I would like to quickly introduce what is the governance in Terra. In short, governance is the process which the addresses in Terra network can affect the change happens in the network, they are not only the network users, but also the influencer.
There are 5 potential proposal types: Text Proposals, Parameter Change Proposals, Community Pool Spend Proposals, Tax Rate/Reward Weight Update Proposals, and Software Upgrade Proposals. (Details can be found in this link)
Analytics
In the following analytics content, I am going to take the data to try to deliver some potential interesting governance activities.
Governance activities overall
Firstly, let’s look at the vote activities. From the below chart, we can find something really interesting:
- Voting activities have the peak time. It makes sense as when there were new proposal coming out, users tend to vote
- As time went by, each peak attracted more and more voting activities (both addresses and the transactions)
- Starting from Mar/2021, the voting start popular, it might also relate to the popularity of the network
- Averagely, users tend to vote 1.4 times
One other interesting analysis I want to do is the Columbus-5, for sure. Let’s do a grouped color to see how it changes for the Columbus-5
What we can find from above 2 charts are:
- Columbus-5 network have more voters compared to Columbus-4
- In Columbus-5, although the activities increases, the average voting times decreases, users tend to vote only 1.1 times
What is the distribution of level of governance activity among Terra addresses?
Let’s do a different view, focus on the address and then check how many votes they submitted overall, then do a distribution analysis. First thing we can find is that most of the terra voters address only vote 1 time, which makes sense as the nature of this dataset should be right-skewed.
Then, let’s do a quick comparison charts with Columbus-5. The interesting findings based on the below chart are:
- Most of the addresses submitted only 1 time vote, which is the same in both Columbus-4 and Columbus-5 chain
- Columbus-5 chain has a more right-skewed distribution compared to Columbus-4 for the voters activities
- The reason behind that might be the time, as Columbus-5 is younger than Columbus-4, so voters tend to vote only 1 time at the very beginning and then start more and more voting
How is this distribution related to how large (in holdings) the addresses are?
To do this kind of combination, we need to take another table from Terra table schema, which is the daily_balances table. Using this table we can create daily snapshot balance for the address and then join it with the transaction id we can have some interesting analytics and charts.
Take a look at the following interesting chart, I took the average balance amount in usd per addresses (group by day) and the average voting activities, mapping them in the following chart, the size is the balance, larger means more balance left and the color means the voting activities, if that is green, then it means this address’ average voting (group by day) activities is more active, red means less actively vote. From that, we can have a quick conclusion that:
- For the large addresses, there are 3 in the chart, there is no obvious patten there, it can vote more or less or just natural.
- For the medium size terra address, they tend not to vote, from the chart we can see that medium size nodes are more red.
- For the small size, the situation is opposite and the green nodes lie most on that. That is a really interesting phenomenon as it shows that in the Terra network, those which holds medium size amount of addresses have the huge potential to vote and participate into the governance activities, we should be able to see some boom in the governance in the future.
All the data, tool come from Flipside Crypto.
