DeepDAO Pro serves as the most comprehensive source of truth of OP Collective governance. We track several metrics under different subsections for treasury, token, voter trends, delegates, coalitions, and the ecosystem of the Optimism collective (including voter interests, and competitors analysis). Our Coalitions, or Power Groups analysis is a unique offering that looks at power concentration and alignment between delegates.
Coalitions are defined as groups of addresses that often vote together on proposals. Coalitions surface the interconnections between delegates, how often they vote together, and their combined governance influence. To truly understand the power dynamics within the Optimism Collective, we need to be looking at such aggregations of voting power, as well as delegates in isolation.
DeepDAO currently tracks coalitions of up to 6 addresses. For each coalition, we define several metrics including:
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The number of times these addresses voted together on proposals.
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Their combined voting power.
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The number of delegators, that have given their power to all members of the coalition.
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Percentage of quorum they hold together.
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Percentage of the OP token’s circulating supply they control together.
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The percentage of voting power they control, relative to the voting power that was needed to win a proposal over the past 6 months.
Sorting by voting power, the strongest 6-member coalition within the OP Collective is:
Linda Xie (@linda) + Olimpio (@olimpio) + Synthetix Ambassadors (@MattGov.eth) - 2 addresses + Jack Anorak (@jackanorak) + Scott Moore (@ceresstation)
Together, they control 12.5M $OP, representing ~44% of the quorum in recent proposals. They have voted together 27 times. Note that even the 20th most powerful 6 member coalition has over 7.7M OP delegated to them, which is considerably more than the largest independent delegate, L2Beat (@kaereste @Sinkas). Hence, to truly understand the dynamics of voting power within the Optimism Collective, the dynamics of coalitions needs to be further studied.
The data tells us that:
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The largest coalition by voting power does not include many of the most influential delegates. In fact, none of the top 5 coalitions (by voting power) include active delegates like L2Beat (@kaereste @Sinkas), Lefteris Karapetsas (@lefterisjp), or Katie Garcia (@katie). This might represent constructive disagreement among key decision-makers.
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Large coalitions are becoming less active over time. In many of the top coalitions, more than 50% of members have voted in fewer than 3 of the last 10 proposals. It needs to be seen if, over the coming years, new coalitions of presently active addresses will form, or weather the nature of governance as the DAO evolves, will inherently break up coalitions due to a higher percentage of contentious proposals.
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Coalitions within the OP Collective are extremely powerful! The most powerful 6-member coalitions in the OP Collective hold upwards of 40% of the winning power. While in a highly centralized environment, we might expect this number to be even higher (even for coalitions of only 3 or 4 members), there is a lot of scope to improve delegate diversity and distribution of power within the collective.
In conclusion, coalitions are an underexplored but critical aspect of DAO governance. Only with tools like DeepDAO Pro can we understand the true extent of decentralization and the interconnections in large DAOs like Optimism Collective. We are proud to pioneer this work and make it freely available to all participants in the Collective through the DeepDAO Pro dashboard.