# x23.ai│Deciphering DAOs: Insights from Off-Chain Dynamics - David│ETHDam 2024

- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 18:41
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-xLBRUqzgV0o
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLBRUqzgV0o

## Description

“Deciphering DAOs: Insights from Off-Chain Dynamics” with David Truong from x23.ai at ETHDam 2024. 
https://x.com/daveytea https://twitter.com/x23_ai https://x23.ai/ 

Sterling Schuyler - MC of ETHDam, copy and content writer for emerging fund managers & crypto enthusiasts.

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## Transcript

[Music] thank you for coming to my talk so today we're going to be talking about decentralized DS insights from offchain Dynamics so for this talk hello yep so for this talk we'll talk about uh Dows protocols communities uh in web 3 and we'll use them interchangeably uh and then we'll analyze some qualitative data as well as quantitative data we'll try to create some insights from that data and enable you to draw your own uh insights uh eventually okay so a little bit about me I'm David founder of x23 doai I'll talk a bit about that a bit later uh previously I was at RV Genesis team back in 20120 and also with coinbase in 2015 I've also been a part of a few Dows both like Venture Angel DS uh but also I'm a reviewer and the a grant Dow as well so talking about definitions of dows and what exactly are Dows so a lot of people have heard about them but there's no real I guess agreement even in this room on what exactly are Dows so for those that don't know Dows stand for decentralized but most of the time they're not decentralized autonomous a lot of times they're not autonomous and organized but a lot of times they're definitely not organized and it can be a little bit like this picture where it's just a bunch of people arguing about like very passionately arguing about certain topics and then a lot of their friends are either watching or participating but that's a good dial if you have like high participation rate right because that's sort of what you want whereas sometimes other DS can be just like a bunch of people hopping on the train either airdrop farming and they're just speculators or they're just watching that's generally generally what you don't want uh depending on on uh I guess the size of the Dow especially if they're just you know looking for air drops or to be leeches to to your organization um and at worst they're just Echo Chambers in that you know you make a proposal and everyone will just agree with you so that's sort of what we don't want so our goal for this talk is that how do we differentiate between these let's call them Dows but when I say Dows I mean communities and sort of online communities organizations how do you differentiate the different types so let's say the the active or healthy DS how do we Define that well we need to look into the data right but what sort of data should we look into so there's price data right but price data doesn't really indicate anything because Traders will be trading and you can see from you know these sort of Dead projects that you know they still have a lot of market value so price data doesn't really mean much in the in terms of the health of DS we can look at social media activity but as you know there's like Bots and Bots will be spamming you can see all the hashtags here so it can't rely on social media activity either voting activity is a bit better so a lot of onchain dials that have voting activity so you can see here there's Unis swap there's uh there's about nearly 400,000 holders and of those holders that actually vote there's about more than 40,000 right voters so that's about 10% of holders and that's pretty good right so that indicates a relatively healthy Dow that's participating that has high participation rate and other piece of data that could be useful is Forum activity so the good thing about Forum activity is quite qualitative but also we get pseudo identities so we can see who are the contributors to the Dow right we not just like faceless people and we can see like what are what's important topics and things like that that's happening in the Dows so what sort of data should we look at we should look at qualitative data that's Forum data quantitative data votes uh also historic data over time so we can compare and then a cross web 3 so we can compare all these different uh DS so we can see you know what's healthy and what's not okay so x23 uh that's my my startup so what do we do we we crunch the data essentially we uncover what's happening across web 3 by aggregating condensing and uh prioritizing all this data to help you make better decisions so we've indexed about nearly 30 protocols now or 30 dials uh across fum discussions snapshots GitHub PO requests GitHub repositories eventually will'll be onchain data uh and also like social data we have about more than 50,000 pieces of content now that we've indexed um and then we recently we created this uh this this this product called Community rankings so it's sort of like let's say defi Lama or coin gecko but for the health of community unities so I have rankings uh you know all time weekly and things like that and so I'll use that as a basis for this talk to dive into the data so what can we learn from voting and for activity a few things right so I'll go through like categories what has being talked about active topics like who who what are the um are there more discussions is it stagnating is it growing is it same or less who are the contributors right who's contributing what percentage is just one person posting everything or like you know lots of people posting and voting Dynamics so are there dissenting opinions or is it just an echo chamber are things passing super easily or is there a lot of friction in these proposals passing and I'll explain what those means and the insights we can get from them yeah all right so categories if we look at categories of of all time we can see that categories meaning like tags so what we did with this data we we we crunched all this data then we pulled out the category tags of like okay what what are people actually talking about on these forums so on number one here you can see this is for all time so make a is the most active di uh then it goes ethereum RV balancer ens getcoin so these are the the types of categories that have been talked about all time right so make a dial stable coin that makes sense cuz they're a stable coin uh ethereum developer tooling that makes sense it's a developer tool arve lending yeah that's pretty good balancer defi you know balancer is a amm but but they don't really talk about the amm part cuz they're a bit more than that all right so they they're talking about defi which is interesting eness identity which makes sense and then getcoin grants and funding so that's interesting we can get insights on what's been talked about all time but if we also compare all time with let's say weekly we can see how it changes right so this was I think two weeks ago actually we can see that the tags Chang so there was a new one in makeal which was vote so that means for that week an important tag came up which was there was an important vote that was happening with ethereum for that week there was less talk about developer tooling and more talk about controver things because there a controversial EIP that was submitted and talked about for a there the same categories you can make your own um sort of insights from that I think it's that the r Community really talks about the same things um they they're quite focused balancer Community talked about funding and I think that was in regards to providing funding to projects to build on top of balancer ens they talked less about events and more about developer tooling because ens started to I guess pivot in this direction of you know trying to bring on more developers to build upon on uh the ens protocol and then gitcoin is interesting that they added social impact so if you've been keeping up to date you can see that gitcoin is like has having this pivot into social impact so those are some interesting insights we can get from just looking at the categories and how they evolve over time right if we look at the topic discussions over time in the same way we can see that we're ranking them from the activity so how many uh topics were created and you can see for all time make da was number one but then for weekly madal went to number five four right but then you see ethereum and RV remained both two and uh three and we had optimism come up right so it's interesting to see like okay makad used from all time makad has the most topics but in the last week it's sort of it's still active but it went down quite a bit and what caused that drop in rankings so if we graph activity over time we can see that hey there's a peak and then now it's sort of going down so what does that mean does that mean like make a dial stagnating as a community does that mean like less people contributing or not well we don't know until we compare to other communities so what we can do is we can look at let's say arva you can see that there's a spike but it's it's trending up if we look at ethereum we can see ethereum it's trending up and if we if we overlay all of them on top of each other we can see that from this graph one interpretation would be that make a DA is uh the discussions at least are stagnating or that they're going more offline right because their maker is like uh sort of restructuring its entire community and you know they have all these secret projects so maybe things are being less publicly collaborative whereas both ethereum and R are increasing or trending up so uh another one we can look at is optimism which sort of burst onto the charts uh at number five we we can look at the topics over time but it's interesting if we compare optimism topics over time and they are the yellow line here so you can see that sort of they they burst on to the scene and they're sort of um pretty consistent almost the same as like RV and ethereum so this this indicates to me this is what a healthy Community looks like like there's tons of activity you know ethereum and arve took a long time to reach that sort of level activity and Ave sort of burst on sorry and optimism bursts on a scene and they're they're quite active so that's interesting especially comparative to to what's happening at makad all right so we can also look at the authors and contributors right so if we look at the author contributor rankings the the middle one here we won't go through all of them but we can focus on just three of the protocols RV optimism and the graph so we can see that uh so we can we basically what we do with the data is that we count how many contributors like made topics and then we can see who uh made the most topics of that community so of AR chaos Labs made 129 posts out of 1,500 posts so that's about 88.4% of the topics created over all time was by chaos right but we don't actually know what that means like there's no insights from that until we compare with other communities so if we compare with optimism the system account which is their official count they did about 12% of the post and then with the graph there's Oliver who did 4.76% of the post so what does that mean does that mean that uh the graph is more decentralized or more healthy than arve cuz you know Oliver is making sort of half the he's the top poster in the graph but he's making half the post that Kos Labs is making we could make that Insight that maybe the graph is more decentralized cuz you know more people contributing to discussions but we also have this other column here which is the voting trends so if we compare the voting trends with the contributors it becomes quite interesting because we can see that RV is quite controversial and the way we measure how controversial the voting trends are is essentially how um the difference between voting like how people vote in proposals whereas the graph it's uh quite unanimous right so what does that mean exactly what are some specific examples well here's so an RVA proposal we can see here that's like nearly 50% voted yes and nearly 40% voted no right so that's a pretty split Community for this other controversial uh proposal is also 55% and 45% right so that's pretty split now if we compare that to the graph proposals what does the graph look like well is like 99.72% voted yes right and another proposal they have another 99.93% right so it's quite unanimous uh when you compare uh the graph and Ave so what does that mean like which is more decentralized you know which has more broad Community involvement which Community is more aligned what's healthier for Community protocol da like I I don't mean to like um sort of uh dive too much into the graph um I know like from a technical perspective they're quite decentralized but from a community perspective it looks like they're not as DEC centralized they're quite unanimous right whether what's healthy or what's not it probably depends on what you're trying to build and stuff I think it's interesting insights for you to draw anyway uh but of course I have to mention that uh authors and contributors can fluctuate over time as well as the voting trends so we can see this is the monthly voting trends it was controversial and then uh sorry arbitrum was quite controversial but AR wasn't as controversial it was just contentious right so if we change the like between week to week or month to month or how many proposals are being submitted it can become more controversial or less controversial but it's always interesting to look over time okay so going back to our goal of how do we determine or differentiate between these different dials we look at the D data uh and and the qualitative data that I mentioned as as quantitative data the discl here is that different dials have different cultures as I mentioned what works for one dial may not work for the others you know makad has a specific culture the graph has a specific culture and AA has a specific culture uh really depends what you want to align with if you want to align with something that has a lot of different contributors you can sort of see what Dow sort of Fosters that or if you want something that has like a very strong alignment with the founding team you know maybe something like the graph or other Dows would be more similar so the the community rankings it's like a a free app uh that you can just go on the website um yeah you can check it out and make your own insights from that if you want uh that's the end of my talk um so I think we can grab some questions now if you guys have thanks for having me awesome thank you so much and I know we did a little bit of questions earlier but we still have a bit of time if we can have the lights up so we can see everyone's beautiful faces lovely lovely question thank you thanks for your talk um are you looking at the repartition of the voting power because typically like you know if five people can vote for like 80% of the of the of the Dow um might you know lead to some result uh not not yet um but what we do is we're looking at uh the the volume of of votes so we can see you know if someone's delegated a lot of votes to someone else we can see that that's why we get like 50 if it's a 50/50 result that means it's quite controversial right uh yeah thanks for the talk it was great um so I I think the data that you have is is fantastic it's really interesting to look at um just to to um push back maybe a bit on the on the conclusions like recently I've talked to many people and and kind of um come to the conclusion that often increasing in increase in activity has actually not a good sign for a DA so it very much depends I think I'll qualify that by what the da wants to achieve um but you know more activity means that um often it becomes more confusing for Outsiders um and you get these kind of inside cabals that basically make the decision it's very hard for anyone from the outside to get through the noise um you know get what's going on um and and especially for defi dos I think that's the case where um probably you don't want many votes you just want to vote on very fundamental things to get the broader Community involved but you kind of want um expert decision making largely um do you have a view on that or would you um agree disagree it's very interested in your perspective I I think o overall I I strongly agree um around there's like too much activity and it becomes cumbersome and that's why I created like x23 a little little Shi of x23 so we we help solve information overload right so essentially we we use like AI large language models to essentially uh condense all that information to make it more easily accessible so that's why we can do sort of data so it's like even if a community is posting like I agree I agree I agree and you have all these spam content we can filter that out so we can actually just draw out the actual proper like um like actual real discussions right so that's what we're measuring here so so I disagree that more activity is bad for the health of the community um but I agree that more activity becomes harder for people to get on board to the Dows and that's a problem we're trying to solve with x23 is to make it less you know overwhelming you know and then you can do like we have a search interface as well so if you're only interested of of like grants for gitcoin you can search for that or if you're only interested in I don't know um risk parameters at RVA like we can just draw that information out yeah all right we got time for one more question okay yeah um great talk thanks um being it such a new field so there's no scientific um balance yet probably um so I'm curious are you aware of a scientist like uh um investigating like Dows and getting to definitions and are you planning to like integrate those definitions or uh into your your protocol because on the technical social site there's so much to discover um and it seems that um you're like generating it now from the data but uh on the definition side I would say there's also a lot to gain yeah I mean uh like like we had in the early discussion um around definitions I think I'm not really like from Academia and I think Academia and Regulators are always like lagging um like for us in this room that are on the bleeding edge um but I do I do have some uh academics that that use our data in their PHD thesis and things like that so I think over the next uh year or two you will start seeing more academic definitions um cuz they they're aware of this um so they they will make their definitions but you know like there's no like Central regulated body that that says this is what you know DS are meant to be and things like that um but yeah I I I encourage you know academics to like come in and and you know study this stuff there's a lot of interesting things a lot of interesting insights they can pull out I think there's no new there's new organizational mechanisms that can be applied to uh you know traditional companies as well um around participation yeah good awesome thank you so much David and if you have further questions please uh ask him outside cuz I'm sure he'd be more than happy to talk to you thank you everyone thank you cool thanks [Music]