Research by the European Central Bank shows that governance rights of the four major DeFi protocols are highly concentrated, with the top 100 holders controlling over 80% of the tokens.

AAVE-4,4%
FORTH-10,35%
UNI-3,73%

Gate News reports that on March 27, the European Central Bank (ECB) released Working Paper No. 3208, which shows that the governance of DeFi protocols like Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap exhibits a high degree of centralization, with the top 100 token holders controlling over 80% of the token supply. Among them, the top 5 addresses of Aave and Uniswap control nearly 50% of the shares. The report points out that a large amount of governance tokens are held by the protocol’s own treasury, development teams, or exchanges, with a certain CEX holding between 2% to 15% of the positions across various protocols. Additionally, top voters are often trusted agents, and about one-third of the agents’ identities cannot be identified through public data. The study concludes that this concentration of power and the feature of identity concealment challenge the claims of decentralization, making it difficult for regulators to identify accountable parties, which may prevent them from meeting the “fully decentralized” exemption conditions under regulations such as MiCA (EU Regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets).

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