Try Quests to earn NEARNEAR State of Governance
This dashboard will take a look at the NEAR Blockchain Governance, differentiating between Technical and Resource Governance:
- Technical Governance defines how a protocol is updated. This includes bug fixing, changes to network parameters or improvements to the code.
- Resource Governance allocates grant funding from community-inititated proposals.
The NEAR Gov Forum is the public forum where discussion of new ideas, improvements and proposals takes place.
The only Technical Governance spurs I could find are via a [Github](https://NEAR Enhancement Proposals (NEPs)) repository with NEAR Enhancement Proposals (NEPs). This makes sense as a first step towards on-chain voting of technical governance since NEAR Specification is currently under active development [1] and it is a more flexible way to discuss complex issues is a more fluid human dynamic. Since NEAR is a big advocate of decentralization and suggest smart contracts and dApps to migrate to DAO-based voting of program updates [2], I expect a change in this direction will also occur once the development phase reaches enough maturity.
With regards to Resource Governance, grant-funding from NEAR Foundation uses a mixed system with a first step off-chain approval process via NEAR Gov Forum proposal that, once approved there can trigger an on-chain vote through the Marketing DAO and Creatives DAO. Some funding proposal will need to be granted directly by the NEAR Foundation. The on-chain results will be analysed in the “Local Governance - Resource Governance” section.
Additionally, it will analyse some validators. Since NEAR is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, new blocks are created randomly amoungst entities running a NEAR node. Users can delegate their $NEAR tokens to these validators in return for staking rewards that can be in the order of 10% APY. The more staked NEAR a validator has, the bigger the chance of creating the next block.
Sources [1] - GitHub NEAR NEPs Specification [2] - NEAR SDK
Local Governance
DAO’s in NEAR have different protocols where they can manage their proposals. AstroDAO and Sputnik DAO are hubs that list the different DAO’s and their voting history. Users receive rewards for submitting proposals therefore incentivizing participation. As defined in the introduction, Marketing and Creatives DAO are responsible for the on-chain vote as part of the Resource Governance. A closer look at their activity will be separatedly analysed.
Most voted proposals belong to Shroom Kingdom (DAO developing a play-2-earn game) and Community (looks like some official NEAR DAO). Compared to the number of proposals, participation is really low. The Merchants of NEAR (financial guild providing analysis on $NEAR) and FRA DAO (musical NFT creative project) are also some of the most voted proposals.
While all DAO’s have a *.sputnik-dao.near address, not all proposals are documented on Sputnik DAO, some of them appear only in AstroDAO.
The Top 12 DAOs (2%) have submitted roughly 50% of the total proposals (30.5k out of 72.4k).
Except from the community.sputnik-dao.near with 163 and ref-finance-sputnik-dao.near with 41, all Top 12 DAOs have 21 or less unique voters.
Methodology
Local Governance results have been obtained from different queries using a join from fact_actions_events_function_call and fact_transactions near.core tables, selecting all transactions where method_name = 'act_proposal' as a way to identify all these on-chain votes.
Validators analysis has been made by joining the above tables and selecting the method_name as deposit_and_stake or stake. This decision was taken after not been able to find a better method of calculating the validators stake and backed by the fact that these 2 method names account for virtually 100% of the on-chain deposit amount.
Block data has been queried directly from near.core.fact_blocks table.
It seems that the fact_actions_events_function_call and fact_transactions near.core tables have not been backfilled as much as fact.blocks table.
Conclusions
Governance in NEAR is still finding its best version. The infraestructure seems to be made for a thriving governance ecosystem, encouraging decision-making in protocols and dApps through DAO governance (at least once the protocol has reached a certain maturity).
It is still not as decentralised as many are hoping for, since 40% of blocks ever created come from only 9 validators and most proposals submitted for on-chain voting come from less than 3% of DAO entities.
A good sign that this is going in the right direction is the fact that newly created validators can compete with longer established ones (see Aurora Pool).