HackMD
SCF #24 NQG Voting Report
BlockScience, Base Report by 13 March 2024. Extended Analysis by XX April 2024.
Introduction
In 2023, the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) and BlockScience (BSci) collaborated on ideating and implementing a novel governance mechanism, titled Neural Quorum Governance. Following this initial phase, we are now monitoring and evaluating this mechanism through per-round reports. This allows the community to better inform themselves about the dynamics and effects of this voting mechanism, informing discussions on changes and adaptations.
Report Summary
On this report, we showcase key statistics along with a breakdown over the votes and the computed power for each project submission.
We also discuss Quorum Delegation, which seems to most affect middle- to lower-tier projects when ranked by Yes/No votes.
This spreadsheet allows you to check the delegatee votes and the quorum delegation result. It allows sorting for any delegating user: submission combination.
Results
Summary Statistics
During SCF #24, 17 project submissions received 340 direct votes, while 59 were delegated. The direct votes can be split into 233 (68.5%) Yes and 107 (31.5%) No votes.
A total of 24 unique voters participated. Out of these, 11 voters chose to delegate their vote for at least one project, whose union of quorums comprised 36 distinct voters.
As for the delegated votes, 12 (20%) were resolved successfully, with 9 (75%) mapped into Yes votes and 3 (25%) being mapped into No votes, while the remaining 80% were resolved as Abstain. In other words, 80% of delegated votes wound up in Delegate Quorums, where no successful agreement was found.
Votes per Project
In this section, we present the vote and voting power breakdown across project submissions. Project Power seems primarily commensurate with the voting pattern in terms of Yes vs. No, although the correlation is incomplete. Delegation seems to be more present on middle—and lower-tier projects (in terms of Yes vs No votes).
Fig [VotesPerSubmissions]: Vote Types for each submission.
The number of delegations was relatively uniform, although the higher tier of projects received fewer delegation actions than the middle tier of projects.
Fig [PowerPerSubmissions]: Assigned vote power per project. Projects with negative voting power are those with more No than Yes voting power was received.
Breakdown of vote types across project submissions
Voting Power Outcomes
This section explores some of the results associated with the NQG-computed power itself.
In table [NQGResults], we can inspect the Voting Power per wallet address (the Power column) and the Effective Power, which is defined as:
We can observe that amongst the voters who did receive delegations, the median potential "bonus" for being a delegate was 250%.
Table [NQGResults]: NQG results across wallets as measured by Power and Effective Power (which also takes into consideration the average power for which the user delegated for). We can observe that amongst delegates, the median Potential Delegation Bonus was around 250%.
User public keys are blacked out to reduce deanonymization of delegation and voting behavior.
Another analysis that we make is to compare the power results against a simulated 1-person-1-vote scenario. We can observe that the project order is mainly preserved.`
Table [ResultVs1P1V]: Comparison of the project submission rankings between the results and a what-if scenario in which each vote would have been assigned as either +1 or -1 (rather than assigning individual voting power).
The results are mostly commensurate, although a few projects had distinct numerical results.
Delegation Outcomes
A total of 84 delegations were made for quorums to decide on a project vote. Of those, 63 (75.0%) were resolved as Abstain votes, 19 (22.6%) were determined as Yes and 2 (2.4%) were determined as No. The Delegatee Votes and the Quorum Delegation result can be checked with this spreadsheet, which allows sorting for any delegating user and submission combination. We choose to be transparent on the delegates set so that the community can best evaluate the results as we're in the earliest stages of the NQG implementation.
In terms of voting outcomes, Quorum Delegation was able to reshuffle a substantial portion of the submission rankings to +/-1 place in the ranking. The highest and lowest-scoring project submissions did not show a change in their ranking. This can be a preliminary indication that QD may be essential for submissions that are near the median and intermediary quantiles over the power distribution.
Table [NQGvsNG]: Comparison between the submission rankings for two scenarios: one in which NQG is activated as usual and another one in which all Delegations are mapped to Abstain.
Fig: Screenshot for SCF #24 Quorum Delegation Results spreadsheet
User public keys are blacked out to reduce deanonymization of delegation and voting behavior.
Neural Quorum Governance Outcomes
Power Across Projects
On the below image, we plot the Total Voting Power accumulated by each submission under distinct simulation scenarios as well as the result column which implements the actual data.
Validating the Layering Logic
We've built a spreadsheet that simulates the layering logic in terms of Neurons and Weights. We've assigned the Neuron Values as being the ones originating from the results data, and it is observed that the numbers from the data are in line with what would be expected from those computations within a magnitude of 3 significant digits. The error in the following digits may be related to rounding and truncation errors.
Fig [NeuronCalc]: A spreadsheet for manually performing the NQG layer calculations for each voter and comparing them with the numbers from the data. The Neuron Values were retrieved from the results. We can observe that the results are similar within three digits.
User public keys are blacked out to reduce deanonymization of delegation and voting behavior.
Developments between SCF#24 and SCF#23
- The Trust Graph Bonus is now defined as a scaling constant (set as 176.0) multiplied by the raw page rank results. This is a rough estimation of the normalized output as per spec.
- Voting History Bonus is 10% for each round between SCF #21 and #23. Before, it was being zero.
