When I am talking about centralization, I am referring to critical infrastructure and governance, not end applications or even non-base layers.
What should we pay special attention to in the crypto space?
- base layers
- the balance between security, scaling and speed
- (de)centralization of block producers
- who runs/controls them
- concentration / diversification of physical locations where nodes are hosted
- concentration / diversification of service providers for nodes
- (de)centralization of token holders
- (de)centralization of the control of who becomes dominant block producers
- blockchain intercommunication protocols or bridges
- cold storage options
- DEXes
- CEXes
- onramps
- offramps
- privacy options
Where has the attacks been focused lately? To CEXes, which also act as onramps and offramps and also centralized bridges in the crypto space between various ecosystems.
Cosmos has a working Inter-blockchain Communication protocol. ATOM, the governance token of Cosmos is on the securities list of the SEC.
Ethereum has 78% of the mining pool distribution in 4 pools (45% in the first 2 pools by market share/hash power):
Being a POS consensus protocol, that's a strong move toward centralization. Those with the most money (banks, corporations, governments) can and will likely eventually control Ethereum.
BSC, Polygon, and even Solana are EVM-compatible. Their governance tokens were all on the SEC list. Reduce options to Ethereum-only or have the additional options under strong scrutiny? Maybe none of these.
On the cold wallets front, Ledger had the idea to implement something to improve adoption. One problem: with that they added security and privacy risks for their users, and both of them are main selling point of their devices.
Microstrategy has been amassing bitcoin for a long time and there's no sign of stopping. People think that's a good thing. I never thought that. In the meantime, big corporations buy Microstrategy stock. People say it's because they can have exposure to bitcoin this way. Maybe...
But how about a different scenario: they buy to control. And by controlling Microstrategy, they control the bitcoin they hold.
Here's the list of the top 10 stockholders of Microstrategy:
All of them nice pussy cats!
And guess what? After a number of bitcoin ETFs that were not approved by the SEC, often with ridiculous explanations (if any), BlackRock applied for a bitcoin ETF too. Someone wants to guess what are the chances of this ETFs not being approved? Lol!
So, what do you think? Where to the crypto space? Racing toward centralization under entities maybe worse than something like Binance and CZ, or on our way to decentralization?