How Decentralized is the Governance of Blockchain-based Finance: Empirical Evidence from four Governance Token Distributions

Understand

Novel blockchain technology provides the infrastructure layer for the creation of decentralized appli-cations.

• A rapidly growing ecosystem of applications is built around financial services, commonly referred to as decentralized finance.
• Whereas the intangible concept of decentralization is presented as a key driver for the applications, defining and measuring decentralization is multifaceted.
• This pa-per provides a framework to quantify decentralization of governance power among blockchain appli-cations.