HackMD
SCF #27 NQG Voting Report
BlockScience, 2 June 2024
Past Reports: SCF#26, SCF#25, SCF#24, SCF#23, SCF#22
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 #27, 13 submissions received 362 direct votes, while 145 were delegated. The direct votes can be split into 238 (65.7%) Yes and 124 (34.3%) No votes.
A total of 39 unique voters participated. Out of these, 23 voters chose to delegate their vote for at least one project
Votes per Project
In this section, we present the vote and voting power breakdown across project submissions.
Fig [VotesPerSubmissions]: Vote Types for each submission.
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Fig [PowerPerSubmissions]: Assigned vote power per project. Projects with negative voting power are those with more No than Yes voting power was received.
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Voting Power Outcomes
This section explores some of the results associated with the NQG-computed power itself.
An 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).
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Delegation Outcomes
A total of 145 delegations were made for quorums to decide on a project vote. Of those, 65 (45%) were resolved as Abstain votes, 66 (46%) were determined as Yes and 14 (10%) 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.
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.
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Fig: Screenshot for Quorum Delegation Results spreadsheet
User public keys are blacked out to reduce deanonymization of delegation and voting behavior.
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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.
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Cross-Round Comparison
Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ff5lSWrEd_EifZEmQrDc7BlU9napOecKh2loS2XcHds/edit?usp=sharing
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Extended Analysis
Developments between SCF#27 and SCF#26
- Prior Voting History Neuron was adjusted for providing a
0.1bonus for SCF#26 - An ideation exercise was performed for introducing an sigmoid form for the Prior Voting History Neuron, with the goal of incorporating learning effects. This can be either be an upgrade or an newly-implemented neuron. See more at Introducing Learning & Saturation Effects into the Prior Voting History Neuron]
Commentary on the Results
- SCF #27 had a significant decrease on the number of submissions (13 rather than 17, or a 23% decrease). This has impacted the total number of votes (507 rather than 771, a 34% decrease). In particular, direct votes were decreased by 20% and delegate votes were decreased by 46%.
- The relatively large decrease in delegate votes seems to be associated with the combination of less submissions and the decrease on the quantity of users that did delegate (23 rather than 29)
- Quorum Delegation is now providing mostly Yes/No votes (56% of all delegations) as outcomes rather the Abstain, likely because of the parametric changes. For contrast, SCF#26 had 18% of all delegations being mapped into Yes/No
