General information and distributions

• In the first section we will take a look at the overall stats of the proposal #82 and as you can see bellow:
• There were total number of voters of 1565 who voted 1808 times and the average wallets size of voters is 60.8.
• All the information bellow were last updated on Dec 11th of 2022.

• By the hourly vote counts measures we can see that the most number of votes were given on Dec 2nd at 18:00 and the vote counts are as mentioned in the following sentence, 58 YES, 3 NO, 3 ABSTEIN and 6 NO with veto.
• The voter type of the same date and hour says that 54 voters voted for YES, ABSTEIN and NO had 3 voters each and the NO with veto types were 6 voters. Except the voters for YES the rest of the voter type numbers are same as the vote counts.
• The cumulative vote count by hour suggests on Dec 4th at 09:00 we hade 1192 YES, 170 ABSTEIN and 115 NO votes. The number of NO with veto votes stopped on Dec 3rd at 01:00.
• The total votes of the studied proposal VS the other proposals is pretty standard to lower charts if I say so myself.
• The total votes of this Prop is about 1808 and the highest number of votes belong to Prop #96 with 3451 votes, on the other hand the lowest number of votes belong to Prop #76 with 1224 votes.
• The voter count of Prop #82 is also mediocre compared to other Props and the total voters count is 1565.

• Between all the voters, we have the four different vote types shown in the column form down bellow and as you can see:
• 1046 voters voted YES, 299 voters voted NO with veto, 100 voters voted NO and 163 were ABSTAIN. The YES type voters make 65% of the total voters and NO types which are the smallest portion here make 6.22% of the total number of voters.
• The average wallet size of people voting in the proposal #82, in different vote type columns, show that in each vote type column over 70% of the voters have wallets size of less than 5 ATOMs and the least portion of voters balances are more than 100 ATOMs.
• The distribution of voters by voter type says that over 90% of voters in each category were regular voters and the least portion the voters that were validators mostly voted for ABSTEIN.
• In the distribution of voters who changed their votes in the final row, in column form, we can see that the most number of vote changers are in the NO with veto to YES change type and the least number of changers are in multiple columns such as; YES to NO, No to YES, YES to ABSTEIN, ABSTEIN to YES and ABSTEIN to NO.
• The same info of the previous line is shown in the percentage wheel in final box with percentage numbers.

Hourly information and comparisons

• The average votes per voter here shows that on Prop #82 the average vote count per each voter is 1.15 and the highest number of average goes to Prop #74 with 1.26 number of votes.
• Also the the lowest average number of votes goes to Prop 94 with 1.07 average of votes per voter.

Conclusion:

• In this article I tried to wrap up a vote proposal of the Cosmos that happened in the past and was rejected due to some number of votes and vote turners.
• As mentioned in the beginning Cosmos is a Network of different blockchains that are interconnected and can COOPRATE and interact with other blockchains in the ecosystem.
• Now here we have the Infamous Prop #82 which was rejected and we can see the number of voters, vote types and the voter who changed their vote that led up to this happening.
• In Prop #82 we had 1565 voters that voted 1808 times which create average vote number of 1.15 for each voter among the other props.
• between the voter of this Prop, around 1046 voters, voted YES and the rest goes to NO with 100 votes and ABSTEIN with 163 votes. Even though most of the vote changers are among the NO with veto => YES but still we hade 299 NO with veto here and it seems like the main reason of the Prop rejection.
• Other than the number of Veto voters around 8% of the voters were first timers as we can see in the columns of the second section in the article.
• With all the matters being said it is worth mentioning that the Prop #82 also is among the less participated Props compared to other voters and votes numbers as you can see in the final section of the article.
• Around 2.68% of the voters were vote changers and needless to mention that they were on of the reasons of Prop #82’s rejection.

Appendix

• Author: Hojjat
• Discord: hojjat7878#8809
• Twitter: @hojjat8d
• Email: hojjat78delshad@gmail.com

\n \n

THANK YOU FOR READING!

Question

Governance in the Cosmos Hub has gotten spicy, to say the least. Despite gaining the support of some of the most influential names in the space, Prop #82 was rejected after more than 1/3 of voters chose "NoWithVeto".

Take a look at governance behavior surrounding Proposal #82 - specifically first time voters and vote switching. Is it possible to identify any key "swing voters" (ie ATOM whales or influential validators) that really turned the tide of the vote? Were any of them first-time voters?

What is the average wallet size (in ATOM) of the people voting? Of the people who changed their vote? Further, is Prop #82 significantly different than other proposals from an engagement perspective? Analyze voting for Cosmos #82 vs. other recent governance proposals in the Hub. Has overall governance participation increased or decrease since Prop #82?

Finally, have ATOM holders re-delegated their staked ATOM as a result of the vote? Highlight any interesting patterns in re-delegation activity.

What is Cosmos? (ATOM)

The Cosmos (ATOM) network is an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate. Cosmos seeks to create an Internet of Blockchains through which blockchains can maintain sovereignty, interact with other blockchains in the ecosystem, and process transactions quickly–making it optimal for multiple use cases. The network functions using BFT consensus algorithms along with Tendermint consensus, which is used to power each blockchain in the Cosmos. Tendermint BFT is a proof-of-stake consensus protocol that powers the Cosmos Hub and the Cosmos SDK (software development kit). BFT (Byzantine fault tolerance) is a consensus algorithm of a distributed network that reaches consensus even when some of the network’s nodes respond with incorrect information or fail to respond. 

The Cosmos SDK is an open-source framework that aims to build multi-asset public proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. The Cosmos Hub is a blockchain that serves as the economic center of the Cosmos platform. The Cosmos Hub aims to provide interchain token exchange, interchain security, bridges to ETH and BTC, and interchain token custodianship. 

According to the Cosmos whitepaper, blockchains are isolated and cannot communicate. They are hard to build and cannot handle a small number of transactions per second. Following this, Cosmos caters to three problems in the blockchain: sovereignty, scalability, and sustainability. 

1. Sovereignty: On blockchains, all the economic activity takes place on a single chain. This leads to centralized governance, ongoing costs for smart contract developers, and high fees for users of congested chains. To solve this problem, Cosmos SDK aims to be free for developers to build sovereign blockchain apps without ongoing costs.
2. Scalability: Cosmos aims to allow blockchain applications to scale to millions of users through horizontal and vertical scalability solutions. Cosmos seeks to achieve scalability by duplicating a blockchain to relieve congestion or splitting up the apps into multiple application-specific blockchains. Interchain token transfers allow these multiple chains to continue as one network. Also, developers can improve throughput with horizontal scalability (multiple parallel chains running the same application and operated by a common validator set).
3. Sustainability: Cosmos blockchains use an efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm for securing the network. This PoS algorithm reduces the Cosmos carbon footprint by more than 99% compared to proof-of-work blockchains.

ATOM is the primary token of the Cosmos Hub and aims to secure the Hub’s interchain services. ATOM has three use cases on the platform.

1. As a spam prevention mechanism, the token is used to pay fees. The fee amount may be proportional to the computation required by the transaction.
2. As staking tokens, ATOM can be "bonded" to earn block rewards. Cosmos Hub’s economic security depends on the amount of ATOM staked. With more tokens collateralized, more shares are at stake, and the cost of attacking the network is higher. Thus, with more bonded ATOM, the network has greater economic security.
3. ATOM holders may govern the Cosmos Hub with their staked ATOM by voting on the proposals.

How cosmos governance works

The Cosmos network is not only a Proof of Stake blockchain network but also one that utilizes on-chain governance. In order for the blockchain to continually upgrade and improve over time, community members will coordinate formally on-chain and informally off-chain to participate in discussions and debates surrounding the trade-offs of specific changes. As some networks like Ethereum do not offer any sort of on-chain governance features, on-chain governance blockchains like Cosmos offer a lot of exciting potential and differentiation around participatory engagement from all stakeholders involved.

What kind of changes are made via on-chain governance with Cosmos? Right now, text-based signalling proposals are when a text-based description of a change is shared with the network to describe the problem and potential solution the proposer is suggesting. This could be a poll or announcement.

Secondly, parameter changes or software upgrade proposals are technical changes to how the network runs, ideally, that will not halt or disrupt the network in a significant way in terms of downtime.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• the inflation rate of the network
• how slashing parameters are applied
• how rewards are distributed
• levels of quorum required
• how long the unbonding period is

To understand process-wise how Cosmos governance works, it’s best to think of these network upgrades in the following stages which are enforced on the protocol level. It is also important to note that delegators (you) inherit the vote of the validators that they delegated to unless they cast their own vote, which will overwrite validator decisions.

Deposit Stage

Anyone can submit a proposal on the Cosmos network for others to view. The only cost associated with submitting a proposal is the transaction fee as little as 0.000001 ATOM. However, over the course of the voting period, a proposal must have at least 512 ATOM deposited to it in order for it to proceed to a vote. This period lasts at most 2 weeks, but if the minimum amount of 512 ATOM is reached sooner the proposal will pass to voting immediately. Currently, there is no penalty for delegators and validators who do not participate in governance, though there is a risk to individuals who deposit ATOM to a proposal if the proposal does not pass the voting stage.

Voting Stage

The next stage in the governance process is the voting stage which also lasts 2 weeks. Rather than depositing ATOM, participants in this governance stage are actually voting Yes, No, No(With Veto) or Abstain. If a proposal reaches quorum or the minimum threshold defined by the protocol of votes it will pass to the next stage for tallying. Only staked tokens are eligible to be used for governance voting. The amount of voting power is measured in terms of stake. The number of ATOM a person or group has determined how much influence your vote will have on the outcome of a proposal. Voters can also change their vote right up until the closing period.

Tallying Stage

After two weeks the proposal voting will end and the following condition will be taken into consideration to determine if it passes or not:

• Quorum: more than 40% of the total staked tokens at the end of the voting period need to have voted
• Threshold: More than 50% or a majority of the tokens that participated in the vote, excluding “Abstain” votes must have voted “Yes”
• Veto: Less than 33.4% of the tokens that participated in the vote, not counting “Abstain” votes, have vetoed the decision “No (With Veto)”.

If any of these conditions are not met, the deposit associated with the denied proposal will not be refunded. These funds will be sent to the community pool.

Once a parameter change or software upgrade proposal is voted on and passes all conditions it will need to be integrated into a new version of the Cosmos network software by validators while the previous working version continues to run. This is signalling that a switch will occur. Once more than 2⁄3 of the validators download this new version and signal they are ready to make the switch the rest of the network is expected to do the same.

Method

This dashboard includes the following parts:

1_ General information and distributions

2_ Hourly information and comparisons

The following tables were used to create this dashboard:

1_ osmosis.core.fact_governance_votes

2_ osmosis.core.fact_daily_balances

3_ osmosis.core.dim_labels

The hourly information is for December 1 to 4, 2022.