For the sake of understanding what drove these numbers, could you please also see what they look like in other reference currencies? Euros and ETH would both be useful.
It’s possible that a lot of this is price appreciation within a DEX or even currency effects. For example, the USD is down a full 10% vs the Euro from the opening of Futarchy to today.
It also looks like the Futarchy market was burdened with not just choosing directionally, but also actual numbers. It looks like it predicted ~$239m TVL increase, but with a realized gain of ~$31m.
Finally, t’s also important to remember that the Grants Council’s expertise is in sourcing, filtering, and closely evaluating specific grant plans. This had strong results.
Contrast with Futarchy, where Grants Council was provided a list of projects without details on what those projects would do with any grant. In fact, two of the Grants Council’s selections apparently had no way to actually accrue TVL according to the methodology, yet were still included on the list of choices. This highlights the low-information environment the GC was asked to select in, when the GC is normally tasked with selecting from a high-information environment, which is just a different skill set.
In short, there was no coherent selection process on the Grants Council side. Speaking only for ourselves, we did not even vote for a full slate of choices because we were essentially presented with names on a spreadsheet without much else, opting to leave voting slots blank. With no upside, no downside, and no information, we would stress that the Grants Council makes a poor control group for this experiment.
The better control would probably be random selection from the list at the start of the season?
Anyway, interesting data, but it’s hard to draw many direct conclusions given the limitations. We would recommend trying to figure out how to mitigate those limitations prior to running another round.