  Blockchain technology is leading a revolutionary transformation across
diverse industries, with effective governance being critical for the success
and sustainability of blockchain projects. Community forums, pivotal in
engaging decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), significantly impact
blockchain governance decisions. Concurrently, Natural Language Processing
(NLP), particularly sentiment analysis, provides powerful insights from textual
data. While prior research has explored the potential of NLP tools in social
media sentiment analysis, there is a gap in understanding the sentiment
landscape of blockchain governance communities. The evolving discourse and
sentiment dynamics on the forums of top DAOs remain largely unknown. This paper
delves deep into the evolving discourse and sentiment dynamics on the public
forums of leading DeFi projects: Aave, Uniswap, Curve DAO, Yearn.finance, Merit
Circle, and Balancer, focusing primarily on discussions related to governance
issues. Our study shows that participants in decentralized communities
generally express positive sentiments during Discord discussions. Furthermore,
there is a potential interaction between discussion intensity and sentiment
dynamics; higher discussion volume may contribute to a more stable sentiment
from code analysis. The insights gained from this study are valuable for
decision-makers in blockchain governance, underscoring the pivotal role of
sentiment analysis in interpreting community emotions and its evolving impact
on the landscape of blockchain governance. This research significantly
contributes to the interdisciplinary exploration of the intersection of
blockchain and society, specifically emphasizing the decentralized blockchain
governance ecosystem. We provide our data and code for replicability as open
access on GitHub.
