Threshold for Bankless DAO membership: A data perspective

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I’ve been reflecting on the brief discussion on DAO membership threshold from Friday’s Community Call (#5) (Jun 11th).

This is an ongoing discussion around whether or not to change the threshold from 35K to 10K (or another number) for DAO membership with solid arguments on multiple sides. I’m hoping to provide a supplementary perspective, now that we have some time series data.

While the core of the discussion is on lowering membership threshold, a related development was the 2nd airdrop which was designed to give people more opportunities to be part of Bankless DAO.

I believe the 2nd airdrop was on June 2nd, so we can examine the numbers from June 1st to present-day to see how the airdrop has affected different categories of Bank membership.

Here’s what the data suggest:

There’s been an approximate + 223 increase in addresses holding $BANK since June 1st.

There were approx 2906 addresses holding Bank on June 1st and, as of this writing, there are 3,129 addresses.

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But we’ll want to see how the different Membership categories changed:

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Here’s how the different membership categories have changed since June 1st:

  • Whale ( > 150K Bank): approx increase + 148
  • Member/Contributor ( > 35K Bank): approx decrease - 69
  • 10K - 35K Holders: approx increase + 95
  • 1 - 10K Holders: approx increase + 47

A question worth asking is:

Did the 2nd Airdrop is achieving its intended effects?

The data suggests it benefited existing members who were on the cusp between member & whale. Since June 1st, there are less addresses in the “member” categories and more in the “whale” category.

This is not to say the airdrop caused this. There’s could be other factors, like people selling their tokens in the open market or became a liquidity provider, but it’s worth noting.

We also have a 95 address increase in the “10K - 35K” category, but as of now, these addresses are not eligible for membership. Then there’s the 47 address increase in the “1 - 10K” categories, but it’ll take significantly more for these addresses to qualify for membership.

Hopefully this data adds to the discussion on Membership threshold and could serve as input for future considerations.

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Awesome work, thank you !!

If I’m not mistaken, the holders who have more than 35000 BANK are now 1752.
It would be interesting to cross this data with the number of Discord members who post at least 3 times a week, so as to understand the level of engagement of the holders in the community. Could you tell me if there is Discord data to analyze?

At that point other lines of reasoning could be:

  1. understand the profile of the members (as per the form presented by analysts and educators)
  2. how to increase the value of the DAO to increase the engagement of the members and the enrollment of new participants
  3. contribution ratio between members and guest pass
  4. whether to make the guest passes only temporary and after an X number of weeks they should either acquire the BANK or pay a monthly membership (as per Kouros project)
  5. which profile (s) to give to the DAO: community of makers, community of artists, defi community, fluid community …

At an empirical level, the second airdrop does not seem to me to have led to a consistent influx of participants who presented themselves to the community and made themselves available to contribute. This would mean that non-members who ask to contribute do so regardless of already having a certain amount of BANK. This is also the classic participation dynamic that occurs in almost all communities.
But obviously only the analysis of the data will be able to confirm this and explain the possible usefulness of future airdrops.

To date I think that the starting point in the reasoning on the membership threshold must pass from point (4). Unlimited guest passes result in the elimination of the BANK ownership criterion to be considered members, even if without voting.

This can have several consequences, both positive and negative.

PRO

  • Opening the community to anyone who wants to participate and get busy, without eligibility thresholds and wealth criteria
  • Perhaps a greater commitment on the part of all, as there are no elective criteria

VERSUS

  • The need to distinguish between DAO (with new eligibility criteria, which could also have even just 1 BANK) and community
  • The collapse of usefulness in owning the BANK token, which must therefore be rethought on new criteria, and the possible consequence of mass sales of the token on the market
  • Elimination of a possible revenue stream for the DAO, that of temporary memberships for non-members who have the minimum threshold of DAO
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Thanks @Grendel ! The number of holders between 35K - 150K BANK is now approx 1508.

Great points about crossing membership numbers with Discord data to gain a better understanding of member profiles.

@frogmonkee shared some Discord data. I’m curious as well as to what kind of insights we can get, will keep the points you raise in mind as I explore the dataset. :+1:

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Nice work @paulapivat :pray:

If you wanted to torture the data further I would be interested to see how many of the current 35 + club are airdropped vs how many have purchased.

Current holder can be downloaded from etherscan Bankless Token (BANK) Token Tracker | Etherscan Airdrop should be available from whoever wrote the contract.

Or how many of the 2021 Badge (@15 k) topped up by purchasing another 20k - possibly manually look at the uniswp / sushi swap contract since the 2nd airdrop?

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Thanks @OverAnalyser you raise some interesting questions, I’ll put it in the Project list for Analytics to explore :+1:

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Questions (and ideas) are easy, the challenge is doing the work to gain insights.

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Moving to archive. Please reply to reopen.