MonkeDAO Whale Voters

    Q51. Extension off the MonkeDAO question last week: A month ago, the MonkeDAO pressed the Solana Monkey Business team for various changes to be made to the royalty and NFT structure to foster growth for the collection. Ultimately this resulted in the first NFT on-chain vote on Solana to accept or reject the SMB team's proposal, with a 'no' likely resulting in a separation of the two groups. In the end, the MonkeDAO voted to unify with the SMB team and to grow their relationship together. Break down the voting behavior for the first three proposals by the following number of monkes per wallet (1 SMB, 2-3 SMBs, 4+ SMBs). Are there any patterns that you see based on number of SMBs used to vote in a wallet? Why do you think ""whales"" voted the way that they did?

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    Introduction Monkees go ape

    In February 2022, an intense debate took place between the NFT Project Solana Monkey Business (SMB) developers and owners grouped in the community-run MonkeDAO over the royalty funds from secondary market sales. The older royalty model was a 5% fee of which the community received a 0.5% cut, being a 2% fee for the creators and the remaining 2.5% for NFT Gen1 holders. The DAO community perceived that much of the current value of the project was driven by them.

    Methodology

    Voting results

    To obtain the voting results for all three questions, a query based on the sample given in the bounty was made to find how many votes based on the number of SMB owned were casted for each question. This was done selecting the following variables and using the following constraints on the solana.fact_transactions table in a CTE:

    • signers[0] as voters
    • case instructions[0]:accounts[6] for each question
    • case instructions[0]:data for each question's results: YES/NO for Q1 and Q2 and AIRDROP/ENTANGLE for Q3.
    • SUM(ARRAY_SIZE(inner_instructions)) AS votes
    • where instructions[0]:programId = 'Daovoteq2Y28gJyme6TNUXT9TxXrePiouFuHezkiozci' as the programID
    • and succeeded = 'TRUE' to take only successful tx into account

    Results

    Question 1

    To the question whether the SMB proposal should be accepted, the vast majority of voters chose YES. There is some correlation between the number of SBMs owned and the percentage of positive votes, being the "whales" (4+ SMBs) the group with higher percentage (98.7%) compared to multiple owners (2-3 SBMs, 97.1%) and single owners (1 SBM, 94%). Results are shown in Figure 1.

    Question 3

    To the question what is the preferred access mechanism to the MonkeDAO NFT, we see again a different trend for whales compared to the other owners. Holders of 4+ SBMs prefer ENTANGLE in 90% of votes as opposed to multiple owners and single owners which prefer AIRDROP (93.6% and 58.2% respectively). Results are shown in Figure 3.

    Question 2

    To the question whether MonkeDAO membership should change from holding a SMB to a NFT issued by MonkeDAO in case question 1 was not accepted, there is a clear trend for "whales" (4+ SMBs) with over 87% of NO votes (membership should not change) as opposed to multiple owners (2-3 SBMs, 20.8%) and single owners (1 SBM, 7.7%), which prefer the membership to change to holding an NFT issued bz MonkeDAO. Results are shown in Figure 2.

    Based on the CTE above, 3 different CTEs were created, one for each question, where the number of SMB's were identified as the votes per signer (1 SBM, 2-3 SBMs or 4+ SMBs) and a count of the voting results for each question. This three CTEs were then joined bz two consecutive operations, giving the results needed to plot each question distribution of results by number of SBM owned as shown in the results.

    Conclusion

    Whale voters defined as owners of 4+ SMBs have different vote preferences for questions 1 and 2 compared to multiple (2-3 SMBs) and single owners. I guess whales still wanted to remain part of the DAO without having to purchase additional NFT due to their already existing investment in more then 4 SMBs, and preferred an entanglement of their existing SMBs rather than an airdrop .

    Luckily, question 1 had a similar vote direction independant of the SMBs owned, and it won by a landslide, so the negative consequences of a divided vote could be avoided.