ECB Paper Claims Top DeFi Protocols Are Secretly Centralized

A newly published working paper sponsored by the European Central Bank has attracted some criticism from legal experts for its approach to measuring decentralization within the cryptocurrency sector. 

The paper argues that major decentralized finance protocols are actually heavily centralized. 

According to Consensys lawyer Bill Hughes, the conclusion is based on incomplete data, and it sets an impossibly high regulatory bar for the industry.

“As you might have noticed, there aren’t really any objective conclusions on centralization v. decentralization here.  There are numbers and then someone offering their opinion on where on the spectrum those numbers put you,” he said.

Too centralized? 

The ECB-sponsored study investigated the governance structures of prominent protocols, including Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap. 

The authors concluded that a significant concentration of actual voting power (even though governance tokens are technically distributed across many addresses). 

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According to the paper’s findings, the top 100 holders control more than 80 percent of governance tokens across all four protocols. 

The top five wallets alone control between 36 percent and 59 percent of the supply. 

The study also states that most active voters are delegates (not identifiable end users). 

This, as the researchers state, creates a rather opaque system where a few entities linked to the protocols themselves are capable of consolidating all the power. 

Subjective interpretation

Hughes has lambasted the report’s rather subjective interpretation of these numbers. He has noted that the authors offer personal opinions on where these metrics fall on the decentralization spectrum. Hence, there is no objective baseline. 

The paper defines true decentralization as software that is entirely autonomous and effectively immutable in operation. In such a way, it establishes a standard that virtually no current project can meet, drastically narrowing the space regulators might consider out of their scope.

Furthermore, the study contains significant data limitations.  The dataset was hand-collected from public and pseudonymous sources, which has led to massive blind spots.

“Their dataset is hand collected from public sources, public DeFi data is pseudonymous and incomplete, and they note possible inaccuracies or missing information.  So, maybe garbage out because garbage in.  Good for them for saying so,” Hughes said.