A network view on The DAO (part 1)

Let’s find out who with whom and when and why

Johannes Pfeffer
3 min readMay 26, 2016

Also read part2!

A nice start was made by

. He did a great job analyzing and visualizing The DAOs token distribution.

I believe for understanding The DAO in action it’s a good thing to look at the way people interact with it. As you may know, the ethereum blockchain is essentially a record of who interacted with whom and what. The players are accounts and send transactions forth and back among each other. So we have a network. And that‘s what it looks like:

Isn’t it beautiful? But what is it?

It’s the neighborhood graph around The DAO until block 1578453, May 24th, 22:12 pm UTC. It contains 19124 unique ethereum accounts and 37703 connections (aka edges, transfers). The transactions have been summarized so that between each node there is only one connection. Clustering has been done using the Chinese Whispers algorithm. That means nodes that are highly connected among each other are grouped together. It is important to note that the graph only shows the number of transactions, not their value.

In order to understand a bit better what we can conclude from this, here is a slightly loosened and commented version.

There is a lot of information missing here. If you know anything about the following addresses, please let me know. It would really help interpret the graph.

Top 10 contributors to the DAO

updated: 2016/06/03

 address                                         ether      tokens
1 0x32be343b94f860124dc4fee278fdcbd38c102d88 871414.6 79237515
2 0x198ef1ec325a96cc354c7266a038be8b5c558f67 314159.3 31415927
3 0x4b0c349e73de949d72dfe4c5136d3f2420d23525 222156.1 21818200
4 0x60e16961ad6138d2fb3e556fc284d9c2fff41486 209000.0 20900000
5 0xfbb1b73c4f0bda4f67dca266ce6ef42f520fbb98 206836.3 18961161
6 0x437631e209736187b21090c0269e7a5f443811c3 202591.9 20259186
7 0x40b9b889a21ff1534d018d71dc406122ebcf3f5a 194191.1 19419110
8 0xddd31eb39d56d51b50172884bd2b88e1f6264f95 112048.0 10035826
9 0xe10c540088113fa6ec00b4b2c8824f8796e96ec4 110000.0 11000000
10 0x36bf43ff35df90908824336c9b31ce33067e2f50 100000.0 10000000
1 = Poloniex, 7 = Gatecoin

Top 10 number of transactions to The DAO

updated: 2016/06/03

 address                                         ether          tx
1 0xfbb1b73c4f0bda4f67dca266ce6ef42f520fbb98 206836.3 8553
2 0x32be343b94f860124dc4fee278fdcbd38c102d88 871414.6 8104
3 0xdf21fa922215b1a56f5a6d6294e6e36c85a0acfb 0 4151
4 0x9e6316f44baeeee5d41a1070516cc5fa47baf227 48144.6 1390
5 0xf0e42abda410cefb5b4dc4de92a3de5b309e02f2 0.0001 1004
6 0x40b9b889a21ff1534d018d71dc406122ebcf3f5a 194191.1 844
7 0x69ea6b31ef305d6b99bb2d4c9d99456fa108b02a 14036.7 515
8 0x946c555081313c5e0986c6cd5f6978257a406237 0 470
9 0x167a9333bf582556f35bd4d16a7e80e191aa6476 63642.4 357
10 0x536fef0b5ae77486a5795048a659d689cd787c36 36270.9 310
1 = Poloniex, 4 = ShapeShift

As the the first proposals come near the decision phase, I really want to find out who draws back and who stays.

I’ll update the graph, so stay tuned. This post is about who with whom. The next parts will concentrate on when and why. I’ll also look at what clusters have the power to decide proposals on their own.

Find the source for the calculations and the graph at github:

Some additional statistics (updated 2016/06/03):

  • There were 29423 unique contributors that sent 65528 non-zero transactions to The DAO
  • 19.6% of the ether in The DAO comes from genesis addresses (from the presale)
  • the top 100 contributors have invested 47.4% , for the top ten this value is still 21.2%
  • Transactions to The DAO are 1.7% of all transactions ever made on the ethereum blockchain
  • The average (as in mean) buy amount is 182.8 eth. However, due to the very large amount of small buys the median is a better indicator of how people buy: 2 eth. For those with statistic foo: the interquartile range is [1.1;52,46]. This means that 50% of all buyers bought an amount of ether in this range.

--

--