Motivation

The web3 space is still early, and we lack clarity on who is actually building — and participating — in governance. Collecting this information can help participants to understand the space better and, more importantly, allow builders to better coordinate and build more efficiently. This information can also serve as a educational tool for traditional media, business, and academic institutions who might misunderstand the diverse and global population of web3 governance enthusiasts.

This project builds on the first phase of the cryptopolitics quiz launched in 2022 which collected information on political and economic ideologies of over 3,000 web3 participants. We believe that a more robust data set, featuring more in-depth questions, a demographic panel, and a more rigorous sampling strategy will help support:

• better decision-making by L1s and other major web3 organizations, especially as it relates to community and ecosystem initiatives,
• better understanding of the diversity of populations in the blockchain / Web3 ecosystem, including at traditional media publications and academic institutions,
• more comparative analyses of “soft” aspects of L1 governance and political economy such as identity and culture, and
• ongoing regulatory discussions taking place. Historical data would also help capture the evolving nature of the Web3 community for academic and historical purposes.

This next phase focuses on two core improvements to Phase One: 1) We will collect a bank of demographic questions, and 2) we will employ a more rigorous sampling strategy.

Documenting this demographic information will allow the crypto community to better understand itself as well as educate traditional media, business, and academic institutions on the diverse and global nature of the space. This project is spearheaded by an academic researcher (political science) who focuses on DAO governance. Being able to describe this census of web3 governance participants is imperative for connecting the lessons from web3 governance experiments to broader governance puzzles and theories in the offline world.

The improved sampling strategy will involved stratified sampling with major DAOs as strata, and we are partnering with social scientists and statisticians who are experts on representative sampling design, to advise us throughout the process. The target sample population will include users with a crypto wallet in a decentrally governed platform — that is, anyone who might be a potential voter/ delegator (regardless of past track record). Importantly, we aim to collect a globally representative sample given the international, borderless nature of many web3 communities.

Implementation

After employing stratified random sampling, we will using Qualtrics to collect information about the following demographic variables:

• age
• gender identity
• education
• income
• employment
• geographic location (country)