What is Cosmos?

Cosmos (ATOM) is a decentralized network of independent blockchains, each powered by Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms.

$ATOM is the native staking token of the Cosmos Network. The Cosmos vision is to build an “internet of blockchains” that can scale and interoperate with one another.

$ATOM has three use cases:

as a spam-prevention mechanism (paying fees)

• as staking tokens
• as a voting mechanism in governance

Cosmos Validator

The Cosmos Hub is based on Tendermint which relies on a set of validators to secure the network. The role of validators is to run a full node and participate in consensus by broadcasting votes that contain cryptographic signatures signed by the validator's private key. Validators commit new blocks in the blockchain and receive revenue in exchange for their work. Validators must also participate in governance by voting on proposals. Validators are weighted according to their total stake. (Read More…)

Cosmos Delegator

Delegators are ATOM holders who cannot, or do not want to, run a validator themselves. ATOM holders can delegate ATOM to a validator and obtain a part of their revenue in exchange.

Because delegators share revenue with their validators, they also share risks. If a validator misbehaves, each of their delegators are partially slashed in proportion to their delegated stake. This penalty is one of the reasons why delegators must perform due diligence on validators before delegating. Spreading their stake over multiple validators is another layer of protection.

Delegators play a critical role in the system, as they are responsible for choosing validators. Being a delegator is not a passive role. Delegators must actively monitor the actions of their validators and participate in governance. (Read More…)

Methodology

In this dashboard, I am going to use __Flipside’s new Cosmos Hub data __to provide some useful details redelegate activity on Cosmos especially based on the validators and voters (redelegators) vote on proposals.

For this, The main table that I am going to use for this bounty is cosmos.core.fact_msg_attributes table.

First, I have extracted the transaction_IDs of redelegate actions by filtering the msg_type column to ‘delegate’ and attribute_key to ‘validator’. the attribute value of this table would be the actual validator operator address, So, We have to filter this column to our validators operator addresses (mentioned above). By filtering the msg_type column to ‘redelegate’ and attribute_key to ‘amount’, we can extract the actual unadjusted Delegate amount (in $ATOM) from attribute_value and by dividing this number by 10^6, the adjusted delegate amount will be extracted. Moreover, by By filtering the msg_type column to ‘coin_spent’ and attribute_key to ‘spender’, the attribute_value column gives us the wallet address of the delegator. (considering that we should also filter msg & attribute indexes to ’0’). There are 2 validators on a Redelegate activity. one is the source validator and another is the destination. So, We have to filter the source_validator and destination_validator columns to our validators operator addresses in order to analyse data of Redelegates To or From the related validator.

For voting activity on Proposals, The main table that I am going to use is also cosmos.core.fact_msg_attributes. Firstly, I have extracted the proposal voting transactions by filtering the attribute_key to proposal_id. the attribute value of this table returns the actual #ID of proposal. Then, I have extracted the voter(s) by filtering attribute_key to 'spender'. Then, I have extracted the vote option of each vote by filtering the attribute_key to ‘option’. There are 4 different vote options for each proposal:

• Vote Option #1: YES
• Vote Option #2: Abstain
• Vote Option #3: No
• Vote Option #4: No With Veto

one of the challenges for this bounty is to identify validator voters (since stil there is not any dim_labels table on Cosmos). Considering that validators vote with their address not operator_address (cosmosvaloper…) there is almost similarity between the first left charecters of their addresses if we exclude ‘Valoper’ from their names. For example, Coinbase Study validator’s Operator Address is ==cosmos==valoper==1c4k24jzduc365kywrsvf5ujz4ya6mwym==pnc4en and its regular non-operator address is ==cosmos1c4k24jzduc365kywrsvf5ujz4ya6mwym==y8vq4q. we can see equal charecters on blue-marked letters.

Vote-changing behavior is extracted by joining 2 different tables of voters on Proposal #82 while their voters are the same but their vote_option and block_timestamp (vote date) are different.

Also, since the data for comparing the validators and redelegators vote options on all proposals is so heavy and is impossible to query them (because u will get 900 seconds timeout, with every different solution that I have tried them) and also the bounty question mentioned to consider one proposal (for example 82) to answer the related question, I have considered proposal #82 for answering the questsions which are related to the validator and redelegators voting comparison.

So, I am going to firstly provide some usefull overall data about Redelegations on Cosmos ecosystem.

Then, I am going to answer the actual bounty questions about validators and redelegators activity based on their votes on proposals.

(Oh I have just realized (Thanks to the Flipside developers!) We have now cosmos.core.fact_validators table ready so I have extracted the label of each validator from it.

Based on the above data, till today (14th December 2022) there are total 147.7k redelegation actions made on Cosmos made by 73.3k unique delegators and with total 62.6M $ATOM volume.

The average volume of redelegates is 256 $ATOM and the median number is 10.1 $ATOM. this difference between average and median volume of redelegates can be because of unusual redelegations volume on Cosmos.

Also, the total number of validators who have lost their delegators is 298 (source) and the total number of validators who have gained migrated delegators is 293 validators (destination).

On the above charts, we can see the weekly number and volume of redelegations on Cosmos over time.

As we see, the highest redelegations activity was achieved during February and March 2022 but after April, redelegations activity has decreased significantly. Moreover, we can see anogher high trend during August - November 2022 but again and especially during recent weeks, the dereasing redelegations activity is visible on the cart.

In terms of volume, we can see the highest spikes on First November week and this can be mainly because of the market volatile due to the FTX & Alameda collapse. But, the highest average volume of redelegations has achieved on July and June 2022.

Moreover, we can see almost slightly increasing number of participated validators on Redelegations (especially source ones) over time.

Based on the above charts, the most number of redelegates on Cosmos were done from the validator with operator address cosmosvaloper196ax4vc0lwpxndu9dyhvca7jhxp70rmcvrj90c (SG-1). Stake.fish as the top Cosmos validator is on the second rank on this chart !

In terms of volume, we can see the highest volume was redelegated from cosmosvaloper156gqf9837u7d4c4678yt3rl4ls9c5vuursrrzf (Binance Staking). The interesting thing is that 2 next validators are also exchanges (Coinbase and Kraken)

On the left charts, we can see the top popular redelegation paths on Cosmos Hub.

As we see, the path from cosmosvaloper156gqf9837u7d4c4678yt3rl4ls9c5vuursrrzf to cosmosvaloper196ax4vc0lwpxndu9dyhvca7jhxp70rmcvrj90c (Binance Staking => SG-1) is the most popular redelegation path in terms of number of redelegates. the next rank is the path from Binance Staking to Stake.fish and the 3rd rank is from SG-1 to Imperator.co

But in terms of volume, the most popular redelegations path was from cosmosvaloper1nm0rrq86ucezaf8uj35pq9fpwr5r82clzyvtd8 to cosmosvaloper1z8zjv3lntpwxua0rtpvgrcwl0nm0tltgpgs6l7. both of these validators are labeled as Kraken.

So, it seems this path is migrating from old kraken validator to the new one.

The interesting thing is that next 2 popular paths also belong to the redelegating from old coinbase and binance stakings to the new ones.

On the above bar charts, you can see the top 10 source validators of each week based on the number and volume of Redelegations from them over time and on the pie-charts, you can see the cumulative share of validators based on redelegations from them. As we see, Binance Staking and also SG-1 has the highest share (in terms of volume and number) in majority of weeks.

Totally, we can see there are 4 major source validators that most redelegation activity are done from them to other destination validators. these 4 host almost 65% of total redelegations as source validators on Cosmos. (Binance Staking, Coinbase, Kraken and one old inactive validator)

And on the above bar charts, we can see the top 5 Redelegation paths of each week based on the number and volume of redelegations over time.

On the pie-charts, we can see the cumulative share of each path.

In terms of number and as mentioned earlier, we can see the most number of redelegations were done in SG-1 =>Imperator.co.

In terms of volume redelegations, we can see there are 4 major paths that almost 70% of redelegations on Cosmos were done within them ! as mentioned earlier, the redelegation paths between 2 Kraken validators have the highest share of volume among other paths.

And on the above bar charts, you can see the top 10 Destination validators of each week based on the number and volume of Redelegations TO them over time and on the pie-charts, you can see the cumulative share of validators based on redelegations To them. As we see, Kraken and also Imperator.co has the highest share (in terms of volume and number) in majority of weeks.

Totally, similar to the source validators, we can see there are 4 major destination validators (especially in terms of volume) that most redelegation activity are done to them from other source validators. (Kraken, Coinbase, 0base.vc and Binance Node)

according to these charts, the most number of redelegations were done from validators which their vote was equal to the redelegator vote and also TO validators which their vote was equal to the redelegator.

So, we can not certainly say that users are changing their validator because of their unequal vote option on proposal.

But anyway, there the difference between these 2 is not so high and we can see also the high share of Redelegations on nonequal votes too.

Moreover, we can see increasing activity of Redelegation during the voting-period of proposal #82 and also few days after that. maybe this can be mainly because of the validator’s unequal vote on this proposal that made the voter to change his/her validator (redelegate).

on the left chart, We can see the vote-changing behavior of vote-switcher validators on Cosmos proposals.

As we see, the majority of vote changes by validators were done from YES to NO and the second most pouplar vote-changing behavior is from YES to ABSTAIN.

Totally, we can see the most number of vote-changin options were done from YES option to other choices.

And on the left chart, we can see the top 10 validators which have changed their vote option more than all other validators.

As we see, the validator address cosmos1clpqr4nrk4khgkxj78fcwwh6dl3uw4ep4tgu9q (Cosmostation) is the validator who have changed its vote on Proposals more than any other validator.

As a proof to the above conclusion, we can see there are only 6% of voters who have redelegated their staked $ATOm after voting on proposal #82 and the majority of them did not redelegate after vote.

Also, According to the above and left charts, we can see the high redelegation activity (especially in terms of volume) during the proposal #82 voting period compared to the other timespans. we can see a huge high spike of redelegation on 7th November (7th day of voting-period)

Also, we can see the redelegation activity is decreasing over time after the proposal #82 voting period compared to the days and weeks before that and especially during the voting-period of this proposal.

As a more clear visualization, I have calculated the average redelegation activity of $ATOM redelegators on these 3 timespans on the left chart.

As mentioned above, especially in terms of volume, we can see high redelegation activity during the voting-period of proposal #82 nad after this timepsan, we can see the lowest redelegation activity.

Summary and Conclusion

According to the above analysis,

• The highest peak of Redelegation activity on Cosmos was during February - March 2022. During May (Terra Collapse) and also after FTX collapse on November, the redelegation activity on Cosmos has decreased significantly but on the major days of the collapse, there was high ReDelegation activity especially in terms of volume.
• The highest redelegation activity were done during the voting-period of proposal IDs #64, #65 and #66.
• SG-1 and Binance Staking validators have experienced the highest number of Redelegations from them to othe sources.
• On the other hand, Imperator.co & Kraken validators have hosted the highest Redelegations from other sources.
• The most popular redelegations path on Cosmos was from Binance Staking to SG-1 (in terms of number) and from old Kraken validator to the new Kraken validator (in terms of volume)
• The majority of validators have voted only once on the most number of proposals on Cosmos. But anyway, proposal #82 and #69 were the 2 proposals with the most vote-changing activity of validators.
• The majority of vote-switcher validators have changed their vote from YES to other options such as NO & NO WITH VETO.
• Cosmostation was the validator with the highest vote-switching activity on Cosmos.
• There was not certain proof that voters have redelegated their staked $ATOM from the validator that voted unequal to the voter’s choice. But anyway, the Redelegations activity has increased significantly during and after voting period of Proposals especially proposal #82.
• The majority of voters on proposal #82 (more than 93% of them) did not change their validator after voting.

Discord: Ali3N#8546 Twitter: Alik_110 Tweet Link For This Dashboard:

In terms of destination validators, most number of redelegates were done to the cosmosvaloper1vvwtk805lxehwle9l4yudmq6mn0g32px9xtkhc (Imperator.co). SG-1 that was on the first rank of redelegates from that, is on the second rank of this char !

But in terms of volume, highest volume of redelegates were done to the cosmosvaloper1z8zjv3lntpwxua0rtpvgrcwl0nm0tltgpgs6l7 (Kraken).

Validators’ Vote Changing Behavior

Top Popular Source Validators, Destination Validators and Redelegation Paths

Redelegations Based On The ReDelegator & Validator Votes on Proposal #82

on Below, I have analyzed the Redelegation activity of voters on Proposal #82 based on the vote choice of their Validators (that have their $ATOM staked on it).

I have done it by comparing the vote option of ReDelegator vs the vote option of its Source & Destination validators.

If the vote option of ReDelegator is equal to the vote option of related validator, it is labeled as “Equal Votes”. else, it is labeled as Unequal Votes.

Equal Votes are defined when both Redelegator & Validator vote YES or both vote NO (No with Veto and NO are assumed as vote NO in this case).

Unequal votes are defined when Redelegator votes YES and validator votes NO or NO WITH VETO or vice-versa.

So, I have excluded the vote option ‘ABSTAIN’ from these results because i think there is no EQUAL or Non-Equal vote option for that !

On these charts, I have calculated the Redelegation activity during the voting-period of different proposals on Cosmos over time.

As we see and as mentioned earlier, the highest redelegations activity were done within March and April 2022 and mainly during the voting period of proposals #64, #65 & #66.

Also, totally we can see that Cosmos has experienced highest number of redelegations during the voting period of proposal #64 .

On the above charts, we can see the number of Validator votes on each Cosmos proposals and also their change or not changing status.

As we see, Proposal id #82 has attracted the most number of Validator votes among all other proposals.

Also, the highest vote-changing activity of validators have achieved on proposal #82 and also #69.

The majority of validators on proposals have only voted once. but anyway there are few validators on each proposal that changed their vote option and the most number of these vote-switchers only changed their vote once.