DeepDAO Research presents: Hunting Vote Miners
DeepDAO Research presents: Hunting Vote Miners
DeepDAO identified dozens of Snapshot spaces with unusual voting patterns, and no meaningful proposals * Thousands of wallets participated * Is this a coordinated effort by airdrop hunters?
In a research conducted recently, DeepDAO found at least a few dozen Snapshot spaces that voted mainly on proposals that seem to lack any serious or operative meaning. Proposals on these DAOs read something like, “Can BTC fall below 30,000?” Or, “is crypto market still bullish in Q2 of 2022?”, “Are you all doing airdrops?”
We term these spaces “Nonsensical DAOs”, and the wallets that vote or propose on them, “Nonsensical wallets”.
Nonsensical Spaces often share more features with other Nonsensical ones, for example their voting token, space title, and repeating proposal titles. None of them ever supply any context: no website or social address, treasury or otherwise something beyond the minimum necessary for operating a Snapshot space.
The governance data of Nonsensical DAOs and wallet addresses present a distinctive network of governance patterns, which lead us to consider disqualifying their governance action from DeepDAO’s aggregated content, and removing some of their voting wallets from our legitimate governance data.
How To Identify Nonsensical DAOs
In this article we describe a generalized path to replicate this research, using DeepDAO’s API. We will also provide one example of Nonsensical DAOs network, with real-data numbers.
Step 1: Identify DAOs to investigate.
The easiest way to identify these groups of spaces is to find all the organizations that vote on the same token. While this is not the only method for grouping DAOs, it is certainly a powerful one and can be easily tracked in DeepDAO’s database. As we observed, there are quite a few spaces that fall under this grouping. For example check this one, with no less than 17 spaces voting on Polygon’s Matic token.
Step 2: Scan the group you identified for nonsensical proposals.
Scan these spaces for proposals that seem to lack any serious or operative meaning, such as the ones mentioned above. Good leads from our API are repeating proposal titles, or token names in proposal titles.
Step 3: Check the names of these DAOs’ Snapshot spaces for similar titles. In one example, we found 17 DAOs that had their proposal titles as some variation of Polygon or MATIC. In another, DAO titles are variations of AAVE, while the voting token is $wMATIC. On these organizations' DeepDAO page you can see all the spaces grouped together.
Step 4: Check for similar ENS domain names by which Nonsensical spaces are registered. In the Aave-named case mentioned above, 12 of the 29 domains are gitcoin001.eth, gitcoin002.eth, gitcoin012.eth, etc.
In yet another case (lumao), we find domain groups of 7 and 13 digits ENSs.
10s of Thousands of Participating Wallets
Step 1: Fetch voting and proposal-making frequency of your nonsensical DAOs, and compare them with those of relevant control groups. We tested the average activity of the Nonsensical DAOs named Polygon/MATIC compared to all other Snapshot DAOs’, and to a group of 10% topmost voting ones.
Our findings include:
The average voting and number of voters of these Nonsensical DAOs are 7X and 10X higher than all other Snapshots spaces, and similar to the averages of 10% of the topmost voting ones.
The Nonsensical DAOs make on average 3X more proposals than the 10% topmost voting Snapshots, with 10X their distinct proposal makers. Compared to all other Snapshots, the differences rise to 10X proposals and 39X proposers!
While the reviewed Nonsensical Snapshots are voted at similar rates to the most multi-tasking and veteran DAO projects, their voting attention is spread between much more proposals. To put it simply, their activity is much thinner than that practiced by the top DAOs.
Step 2: Decide where to put the thresholds. In other words, is the Nonsensical DAO activity unusual enough, so as to be excluded from genuine DAO behavior data?
In our case:
The voting rates of Nonsensical Snapshots are much higher than those of the group of all other Snapshots, and their proposal-making is distinctively higher even compared to topmost-voting ones.
The coordination mechanics of these nonsensical DAOs is hence found to enable the management of exceptionally heavy voting and proposal-making, between tens of thousands of participant addresses, which spread their attention exceptionally thin over a long period of time, and without any public footprint, documentation, social space or visible tokenomics.
We find this sufficient to reduce all voting and proposal-making made in these DAOs from our governance totals and DAO Participation Scores.
Voting patterns of Nonsensical DAO Wallets
Our research found that wallets that voted on nonsensical DAOs, also vote often in DAOs that have genuine Snapshot spaces. This is how we identified this behavior:
Step 1: Query DeepDAO’s database for the activity of your Nonsensical wallets in all other DAOs. What are these wallets doing besides being Nonsensical? Our lead example is the Polygon/MATIC Snapshots, and their total of 43,051 voting wallets.
We found that 22,711 Nonsensical wallets have so far voted in at least 1 legitimate DAO, totalling 507,192 votes over 2,208 different Snapshots.
About 50% of these votes have been cast in either of 15 well-known project Snapshots such as Optimism, Aave, Arbitrum, Stargate, Uniswap, Decentraland, and Ape Coin, followed by dozens of other identified projects.
Intense voting by Nonsensical wallets on other Nonsensical spaces was also observed.
Step 2: Query activity data by Nonsensical wallets in all legitimate Snapshots spaces, and compare it with those of all Snapshot voters / chosen control groups.
In our example, Nonsensical addresses have voted in other DAOs an average 22.31 times each, which is 3.5X higher than the average Snapshot voters of 6.12 votes.
Nonsensical addresses have voted in 5.87 other DAOs per address, compared to an average of 1.71 DAOs voted-in by all Snapshot voters, which is 3.4X higher.
Per-address Voting rates are hence distinctively high.
Step 3: Choose a well-known DAO to see if your Nonsensical wallets vote in bulk on it.
For example, we focused on two of the topmost-voted DAOs by Polygon/MATICs addresses, namely: Optimism and Arbitrum Snapshots.
We also considered possible governance incentives. For example, Arbitrum Snapshot proposals were declared part of its launching campaign, which lead to becoming eligible for an airdrop; Many Optimism proposals are asking voters to choose between airdrop-likely projects, and to influence their identities.
Step 4: Query Nonsensicals’ voting on your chosen legitimate DAO, and test whether it is exceptionally high. Here is an examples for our Polygon/MATIC Nonsensical spaces:
Example 1: Voting on Optimism Snapshot space (opcollective.eth):
We studied the 1,908 Nonsensical addresses that voted on Optimism. Together, those total 69,194 votes there, covering Optimism’s entire 93 proposals from 9.6.2022 to 18.1.2023.
Each Nonsensical address has voted an average 36.27 times on opcollective.eth, which makes almost 3X the 12.91 average by the DAO’s total 88,657 voters. Repeated querying of randomized n=1,908 from among all Optimism voters corroborates this as results are closely aligned around the total average.
Next Steps
In conclusion, there seems to be a collective effort going on here. We don’t want to presume what is the motivation behind it, before conducting further research, and so we continue to enhance and refine our findings. One such effort is to find more examples of Nonsensical spaces, and their activity.
Another ongoing research compares the list of wallets we find within these DAOs, with their activity once they received an airdrop from well known projects such as Optimism and Arbitrum.
Stay tuned for more!
The Nonsensical spaces identification effort was conducted by Noam Hof, DeepDAO’s head of research.
A Growing Use Case for DAOs: Decentralized Science
One of the growing use cases for DAOs is decentralized science. As the #1 aggregator for DAOs, DeepDAO stays on top of the DeSci movement with a categorization of these DAOs, and research into their data.
Our Decentralized Science category currently lists 17 DAOs, the largest of which by treasury are VitaDAO, and ResearchHub.
Hackathon Bounties
DeepDAO has two bounties in the Global DAO Hackathon, organized and coordinated by Aragon.
These are the DeepDAO bounties:
Finding Ideal Wallets for Airdrops Among Governance Participants (this one is related to the topic of our research above).
Onboarding DAOists to DeepDAO.
To see the bounties head to the DAO Global Hackathon 2023 Bounties page.
About DeepDAO
DeepDAO is the #1 discovery engine for DAOs, and the top tool for aggregating, listing, and analyzing governance. With thousands of listed DAOs, and millions of governance participant profiles, DeepDAO is a vast network of social and work-related connections in the Web3 space. Top research teams, leading media institutions, VCs and DAOists rely on DeepDAO data to report on the explosively growing DAO ecosystem.
Site: DeepDAO.io
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