Voting mechanisms play a crucial role in decentralized governance of blockchain systems. Liquid democracy, also known as delegative voting, allows voters to vote directly or delegate their voting power to others, thereby contributing to the resolution of problems such as low voter turnout. In recent years, liquid democracy has been widely adopted by Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) blockchains and implemented successfully on platforms with millions of users. However, little is known regarding the characteristics and actual effectiveness of liquid democracy in decentralized governance. This paper explored for the first time the practical implementation of liquid democracy in DPoS blockchain systems. Using actual data collected from two major DPoS blockchains, EOS and Steem, our study compared and evaluated the participation of different types of users of DPoS blockchain systems in liquid democracy, as well as extracting and analyzing the delegation chains and networks formed during the process of liquid democracy within the systems. We believe that the findings of this paper will contribute to further studies on the design and implementation of liquid democracy and other voting mechanisms in decentralized governance.

翻译：投票机制在区块链系统的去中心化治理中扮演着关键角色。液态民主，又称委托投票，允许选民直接投票或将其投票权委托给他人，从而有助于解决投票率低等问题。近年来，液态民主已被委托权益证明（DPoS）区块链广泛采用，并在拥有数百万用户的平台上成功实施。然而，关于液态民主在去中心化治理中的特征和实际效果仍知之甚少。本文首次探讨了液态民主在DPoS区块链系统中的实际应用。利用从两大主流DPoS区块链EOS和Steem收集的实际数据，我们的研究比较并评估了DPoS区块链系统中不同类型用户参与液态民主的情况，同时提取并分析了系统内液态民主过程中形成的委托链和网络。我们相信，本文的研究成果将有助于进一步研究去中心化治理中液态民主及其他投票机制的设计与实现。