On snapshot, 86,3% of all votes are “Yes” votes. Please note that this number does not reveal anything about the weight of a specific vote.

Vote participation

A high participation in terms of tokens can be misleading. An important question to ask is if it is just the core team voting on their own proposals or others are participating as well. https://deepdao.io shows this metric for most DAOs that are listed.

Our analysis of snapshot data indicates that while the average number of votes per proposal is 92, the median number of votes is just 6, indicating that only very few DAOs have a lot of active members that vote for proposals. Furthermore, increasing participation (best measured as the number of individual addresses) is obviously a healthy sign.

Token distribution

An assessment of the distribution of tokens among its holders is important for any project with a token. For ERC-20 tokens a distribution chart is easily accessible on Etherscan for example. It also makes sense to look at it for DAO governance tokens. One metric that can be used to assess the token distribution at one glance is the Gini coefficient. A helpful reference on the subject is the paper “Decentralized Finance, Centralized Ownership?“ (Nadler & Schär, 2020). For ERC-20 contracts, the publicly accessibly website https://bloxy.info shows the metric, although it is advisable to not blindly trust the numbers. As a majority of governance tokens is often kept in DAO treasuries, these tokens should be ignored for the calculation. The Gini coefficient should not be overused, however.

Community

Number of members

The total size of the community can be defined as all members. Who exactly a member is, differs case by case. Some DAOs count any member of a discord or telegram group a member, while others only view holders of specific tokens as real members. Research shows that a DAO with less than 20 token holders can generally be ignored (Rikken et al., 2021).

Commitment of contributors

Most members in any online community are lurkers who do not contribute meaningfully but are rather passive according to research (Nielsen, 2006). This metric is hard to assess and likely involves manual screening of chat rooms, forums, reddit or other platforms for levels of interaction. A good sign is usually if there are several active moderators around who are not a part of the core team.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) could be a good tool to frequently assess the mood of members and contributors.