Try Quests to earn NEARA NEAR perfect government ?
Every city has its governors, and the City of NEAR is no different. Assess the state of governance on NEAR, with an eye toward assessing its decentralization.
Introduction
The record books at the city of near needs to be maintained and someone needs to enforce the set rules. Well, isn’t that what governance means. Technically, Yes. In the city of near, the rules are set and recorded in smart contracts, and validators run them to enforce it. Who are the top validators, how is there work going , Are they doing their job properly, what is thier impact on the society. These are some of the questions we’ll be trying to answer in this article.
Takeaways
- Meta pool and aurora pool are amongst the most favourite with meta pool having the highest retaining percentage.
- staked-pool-v1 is definitely amongst the hardest working, processing the majority of transactions.
- The health of the governance ecosystem has been stable over the last few months, but has to improve.
- The promotional program by cheddar wasn’t enough to retain customers
- Among the companies, cards.berryclub.ek.near is the most happening company out there
Health
Is a decentralised government really decentralised ? How secure is a trustless system ?
In the near ecosystem, the validators are further split into shards ( or regional goverment ?). The output of all the shards make up the output block, and the output of 1 shard affects the entire whole ecosystem. Well, what if there is a malicious actor ?
For the sharded ecosystem to be healthy, there should be enough number of validators in each shard. We can thus define a metric, validators to shards ratio as an indicator of the ecosystem health. reference
Bonus material
As a promotion program cheddar pool decided to reward every users 10 cheddar for every 1 near token staked with them. my source. How did it go ?
Companies
Not just the government, but some companies on near too crave for decentralised type of functioning. They constantly ask their users feedback and ask them opinions on taking the company forward. Alright, but which company on NEAR are most proactive this way and how are the citizens reacting ?
In the city of Near, all transactions are verified and recorded by officials known as validators. Their power comes from two sources, either they are very rich or they have the support of the citizens. Citizens show their support by staking their NEAR tokens with the validators.
The citizens can remove their near (unstake) if they feel that the validator is not honest enough as this would result in the wrath of gods and a slashing of tokens.
To account for this, we determine the support by only looking at the citizens still invested in the validator. That is, staked minus unstaked.
Out of all the validators, meta-pool.near and aururoa-poolv1.near are the most favourite of the citizens by the sheer number of users.
But hey wait, what about by the amount staked ?. By amount staked, it again appears that meta-pool.near is the most trusted one. However, aurora-poolv1.near is not, and instead aurora.pool.near can boast of higher amount. Surprisingly, a popular CEX binance node 1 has the support of few but wealthy citizens.
Interesting area : look for the top left of the graph.
We define retain percent as the percentage of users of who have stuck to the same validators and haven’t un-staked. The higher the better, the top left corner of the graph indicates that the validator commands a huge support from the citizens while the size of the marker indicates the amount of near it holds.
Through this, we can clearly say that meta pool and astro stakers are among the most powerful validators.
Are hardworking validators getting the support they deserve ?
Well, not really. While meta-pool, astro-stakers and aurora pool had a huge popularity. Most of the work is carried out by staked.pool.v1.near. Although staked.poolv1.near is out of the top 10 by popularity, they have done far more work than both aurora and meta-pool combined. This clearly indicates that the hardworkers are not supported adequately enough. :disappointed:.
In terms of validator proposals, aurora.poolv1.near and astro-stakers.poolv1.near are the leaders. They have proposed the highest number of times and are amongst the most active in terms of proposals.
There are a total of 4 regional governments (shards) in the ecosystem and the plan is to increase them as the city gets crowded. Currently, there are close to 25 validators for each region. The higher the better.
Below is a table that visualises the probability of the ecosystem being hacked by malicious validators.
We see that as the number of validators increases in each shard, the probability of a compromise decreases exponentially.
On Nov 17 2021, a proposal to increase shards to 4 was passed, hence there was a drastic drop in the ecosystem health. however, as time passed and more validators joined, the health has improved significantly.
The number of validators has more or less remained constant in the past 3 months by hovering around 100 validators
As expected, the citizens staked a lot of times during the program only to farm the cheddar tokens.
The volume staked with cheddar however significantly reduced after the program was over. Nice try but tough luck kid.
It appears that cards.berryclub.ek.near and dotz.near are the most open to suggestion and citizens too love taking part in it.
But what is berry club ?
Berry Club is a DeFi app designed to let users have fun creating shared pixel art while farming token rewards
However, sputnik dao which is the go-to place for proposals on Near has the highest number of proposals