ECB paper questions if DeFi DAOs are decentralized enough to sit outside MiCA

An ECB working paper found DeFi governance remains highly concentrated, complicating efforts to identify who should fall under MiCA oversight.

The European Central Bank published a working paper on March 26, finding that governance in four major DeFi protocols was heavily concentrated.

The staff paper looks at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap, and finds that while governance tokens are held across tens of thousands of addresses, the top 100 holders control more than 80% of the supply in each protocol.

Based on holdings snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023, the authors found that a large share of governance tokens could be linked either to the protocols themselves or to centralized and decentralized exchanges, with Binance the largest identified centralized exchange holder across the four protocols.

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