Decentralization illusion in Decentralized Finance: Evidence from tokenized voting in MakerDAO polls
研究了MakerDAO协议中治理的集中化程度，发现投票权分布影响协议，去中心化金融投资者面临去中心化与性能的权衡。
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is very popular in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications as it provides a decentralized governance solution through blockchain. We analyze the governance characteristics in the Maker protocol, its stablecoin DAI and its governance token Maker (MKR). To achieve that, we establish several measurements of centralized governance. Our empirical analysis investigates the effect of centralized governance over a series of factors related to MKR and DAI, such as financial, network and Twitter sentiment indicators. Our results show that governance centralization influences the Maker protocol and that the distribution of voting power matters. The main implication of this study is that centralized governance in MakerDAO very much exists, while DeFi investors face a trade-off between decentralization and performance of a DeFi protocol. This further contributes to the contemporary debate over whether DeFi can be truly decentralized.