  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.
