Smart contracts are contractual agreements between participants of a blockchain, who cannot implicitly trust one another. They are software programs that run on top of a blockchain, and we may need to change them from time to time (e.g., to fix bugs or address new use cases). Governance protocols define the means for amending or changing these smart contracts without any centralized authority. They distribute instead the decision-making power to every user of the smart contract: Users vote on accepting or rejecting every change. The focus of this work is to evaluate whether, how, and to what extent these protocols ensure decentralized governance, the fundamental tenet of blockchains, in practice. This evaluation is crucial as smart contracts continue to transform our key, traditional, centralized institutions, particularly banking and finance. In this work, we review and characterize decentralized governance in practice, using Compound -- one of the widely used governance protocols -- as a case study. We reveal a high concentration of voting power in Compound: 10 voters hold together 57.86% of the voting power. Although proposals to change or amend the protocol (or, essentially, the application they support) receive, on average, a substantial number of votes (i.e., 89.39%) in favor, they require fewer than three voters to obtain 50% or more votes. We show that voting on Compound governance proposals can be unfairly expensive for small token holders, and also discover voting coalitions that can further marginalize these users. We plan on publishing our scripts and data set on GitHub to support reproducible research.

翻译：智能合约是区块链参与者之间无法互相信任的契约协议。它们是运行在区块链上的软件程序，可能需要不时进行修改（例如，修复漏洞或应对新的应用场景）。治理协议定义了在没有中央权威机构的情况下修改或变更这些智能合约的方式。相反，它们将决策权分配给每位智能合约用户：用户对接受或拒绝每次变更进行投票。本研究的核心目标是评估这些协议在实践中是否、如何以及在多大程度上确保去中心化治理——这一区块链的基本原则。随着智能合约持续变革传统的中心化关键机构（尤其是银行与金融领域），这一评估至关重要。本研究以广泛使用的治理协议Compound为案例，审视并刻画了实践中的去中心化治理。我们发现Compound中投票权高度集中：10位投票者共同持有57.86%的投票权。尽管修改或变更协议（本质上是其支持的应用程序）的提案平均获得大量赞成票（即89.39%），但仅需不到三位投票者即可获得50%或以上的票数。研究显示，对于小型代币持有者而言，参与Compound治理提案的投票成本可能过高，并且我们发现了可能进一步边缘化这些用户的投票联盟。我们计划在GitHub上发布脚本和数据集，以支持可重复研究。