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Introduction

Proof of Humanity (POH) is a DAO that, since early 2021, takes care of the Proof of Humanity protocol, a system developed on Ethereum’s mainnet that combines webs of trust with reverse Turing tests and dispute resolution to create a sybil-proof list of humans. Members of this curated list can benefit from subsequent implementations, such as the Universal Basic Income (UBI) token, which drops every minute.

Using Snapshot’s data gently provided by Flipside Crypto, we’ll take a look into their governance highlights.

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Data

Data was queried from Flipside Crypto’s Velocity database, and the SQL code used is shown below. The result of this chunk is a dataset containing all votes casted on all POH related proposals:

select * 
from ethereum.core.ez_snapshot 
where space_id = 'poh.eth' or space_id = 'proofofhumanity.eth'

Explaining POH’s governance:

So, how does this DAO works? Each proposal (called HIP for “humanity improvement proposal”) goes through 3 stages, two of which are voted on Snapshot (none of them is voted on-chain):

  1. Phase 1 (Ideation): consists on a post on their governance forum, detailing the proposal objective and facilitating an initial, informal discussion. For it to pass to Phase 2, it has to gain attention from the community, as there’re no formal requirements.

  2. Phase 2 (Specification): voted on Snapshot, it’s a signalling poll that last 3 days, and, for it to pass to Phase 3, there must be one outcome with a relative majority of votes (of course, it has to include the option “Make no changes”).

  3. Phase 3 (Consensus): a binding vote on Snapshot that lasts 7 days for a refined and improved proposal. For proposals to be accepted in this final phase, there must be one outcome with a relative majority of votes. If the relative majority of votes on the proposal indicates the result Make no changes, the proposal will not be accepted and considered closed.

It’s also important to note that each registered person has a vote, but also that this democracy is liquid, so any of them can delagate their vote to another registered human. Note that this aspect is not taken into account in this dataset, so any vote that we see here appears to count as one but might have more voting power.

Governance summary:

Analysis

So, let’s see some aspects of this DAO’s governance:

Basic statistics:

Let’s see some basic summary statistics:

Amount.of.proposals Amount.of.authors Amount.of.voters
85 25 2344

So, we have a total of 2344 unique voters for 85 Snapshot votes (if we count both Phase 2 and Phase 3 votes), and 25 different authors. But, as it’s commonly known in the DAO and Web 3 space, not every member participates actively, and not even every person who has voted once votes on every proposal. So, how many votes have each proposal received?

PROPOSAL_TITLE n date
[Phase 3] HIP-50 Clarify which Telegram group and Twitter accounts belong to PoH DAO 768 2022-07-14
MISSION BOARD ELECTION 742 2022-05-21
[Signalling] [Phase-2]: Accept 352 as width in vertical video submissions 474 2021-05-05
[Phase 2] HIP-49: Change of Arbitrator 317 2022-07-06
[Phase 3] [Binding] HIP-41: Allow verbal confirmation for registrating users 311 2022-04-22
[Phase 2] HIP 48 - Removal of Clement Lesaege as mission board member 264 2022-06-29
[Phase 2] [Signaling] HIP-42: Allow Spanish phrase 261 2022-04-29
[Phase 3] [Binding] HIP-42: Allow Spanish Phrase 258 2022-05-31
[Phase-2] [Signalling] HIP-27: Allow 1-character mistakes in displayed addresses 220 2021-11-19
[Phase 3] [Binding] - HIP 27: Allow 1-character mistakes in displayed addresses 216 2022-01-05

Here we can see that the most voted proposals received more than 700 votes, and we can also appreciate how the participacion has increased over time, despite some rough votes at the beginning of 2021:

Voters and authors:

And what about voters and authors? If we take top ten users by the amount of proposals in which they participated, we can see that almost all of them voted in at least half of these 85 voting sessions. Given that voting is not mandatory, this level of top user involvement must not be underrated:

VOTER n
0x4Ca2a670bd5505B870B21331a53D9bB4AE6e2084 56
0x2A52309eDF998799C4A8b89324CCAd91848c8676 55
0x6687c671980E65ebD722b9146Fc61e2471558dd6 54
0xC88920b0e3DAab93e9b539a21764A2F50682c2Ec 53
0x482C96b007EA453cb55A3DC11ceB8830e18F0639 49
0xfd1Af514B8b2bf00d1999497668BFF26Ccdf4C8a 47
0xC97C5931C53223B434b64B44d03f4d5B404126b1 44
0x4074D0b0519610bb675e7d74B4171039d230F451 41
0x68c0dd2b5A5df00Bca4f7df8CA9b1425Fe817728 40
0x504E7620069a0a8354434dED3150ed7E2ECF5153 39

As regards to authors, it appears that there are some users that tend to write many of these proposals, but the taks is not highly centralized at all, given that in the top ten authors (of a total of 25) have written at least 3 proposals each:

Authors:

PROPOSAL_AUTHOR n
0x77E851A926297fff2E6BC8FDbB5bB6087a617eC5 15
0x2A52309eDF998799C4A8b89324CCAd91848c8676 10
0x17a91203A9E9C3519c2F76210497eF7F4BE2352F 7
0x504E7620069a0a8354434dED3150ed7E2ECF5153 7
0xfd1Af514B8b2bf00d1999497668BFF26Ccdf4C8a 7
0x6986E8C8Da33753443959690c240B03931Bd1Edc 5
0x2ad91063e489CC4009DF7feE45C25c8BE684Cf6a 3
0x3B72992488a93757da45CC5b43172010B9db0E47 3
0x6687c671980E65ebD722b9146Fc61e2471558dd6 3
0x9EC8A9256DbAAcA18992A1c1a90b78F3B3b54b68 3

Proposals:

Finally, we can dive into the content of some of these proposals:

Take, for example, the most voted proposal up to date, HIP-50, which states: “Clarify which of Proof of Humanity Telegram group belongs to the DAO”.

This might be a little confusing, and Snapshot data cannot tell us a lot about the reason for this proposal being the most voted. As an active member of the DAO, I can say that there’s quite a story behind this, and that the outcome was more symbolic than practical, as it represented a political dispute between two sides. The outcome reflects this, as it was a pretty disputed vote, which ended up in the passing of the proposal:

HIP-50

VOTE_OPTION n
Accept changes 492
Make no change 276

HIP-49

Another example of this increasing politization was a HIP-49, which aimed at changing the smart contract that deals with disputes to the profile submission and removals with “a new one that serves better the interests of the Proof of Humanity community”. Note that this time the proposal, which was driven by some of the same people who won HIP-50 vote, couldn’t make it to Phase 3, as it lost the vote in Phase 2:

VOTE_OPTION n
Pass to Phase 3 130
Make no change 187

HIP-8

However, not every proposal in this DAO is a political dispute, sometimes the topic discussed is more technical, as Phase 2 of what was later known as HIP-8 shows us. In this case, what was being discussed were some technical characteristics of video submission, as each member of POH has to upload a video stating that he/she is a human that’s not already registered:

VOTE_OPTION n
Pass to Phase 3 317
Make no change 157

So, all in all, voting in POH DAO seems to be pretty fun, as a wide variety of topics are discussed and voted, ranging from purely political disputes to quite technical aspects, and, what’s more important, the outcomes are always unknown and votes are many times quite disputed.

Key Takeaways

Analysis Details

Code

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