The study found that 1% of DAO members own 90% of governance tokens that give them voting power.
Chainalysis analysts announced a major study on the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) sector. One of the study’s main “discoveries” was the high centralization of management decisions within DAOs. This resulted from the unequal distribution of digital assets among organization members — less than 1% of whales own 90% of governance tokens.
The report focuses on the situation that all governance token holders technically have the right to vote, but an overwhelming minority can put a proposal to a vote, given the number of tokens required to do so. According to calculations by Chainalysis analysts, between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 10,000 DAO members can create proposals, and between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 30,000 users can unilaterally influence any decision. Figures differ depending on the conditions of a particular organization.
So the decentralization principles in DAOs are implemented technically, but they are not realized in practice due to the distribution of governance tokens. This, however, does not change the growing popularity of DAOs, which increased from 700 to 6,000 over 12 months by late May 2022.
