Governance protocols define the means for amending or changing smart contracts without any centralized authority. They distribute the decision-making power to every user of the smart contract: Users vote on accepting or rejecting every change. In this work, we review and characterize decentralized governance in practice, using Compound and Uniswap -- two widely used governance protocols -- as a case study. We reveal a high concentration of voting power in both Compound and Uniswap: 10 voters hold together 57.86% and 44.72% of the voting power, respectively. Although proposals to change or amend the protocol receive, on average, a substantial number of votes (i.e., 89.39%) in favor within the Compound protocol, they require fewer than three voters to obtain 50% or more votes. We show that voting on Compound proposals can be unfairly expensive for small token holders, and we discover voting coalitions that can further marginalize these users.

翻译：治理协议定义了在没有中心化权威的情况下修改或变更智能合约的机制，将决策权分配给智能合约的每一位用户：用户通过投票决定是否接受或拒绝每一次变更。本研究以Compound和Uniswap——两种广泛应用的治理协议——作为案例，系统梳理并刻画了去中心化治理的实际运行特征。我们发现Compound和Uniswap的投票权高度集中：分别有10位持有者掌控了57.86%和44.72%的投票权。尽管修改或变更协议的提案在Compound协议中平均能获得89.39%的高比例赞成票，但只需不到三位投票者即可获得50%及以上的支持票。研究表明，对于小额代币持有者而言，在Compound提案中投票的成本可能极不公平，同时我们还发现了可能进一步边缘化这些用户的投票联盟。