Only 16% of crypto assets are truly decentralized

One of the central pillars of cryptocurrencies in general is that the system was initially decentralized, without giving a single point of control and control from the outside. However, new research by the blockchain company CryptoCompare has shown that most of the assets in the ecosystem today are controlled by large players.

CryptoCompare, a cryptocurrency market data aggregator, has published a report on the classification of crypto assets. The nearly 80-page document is designed to provide investors, regulators and analysts with an independent classification of coins to help make sense of the long list of ever-growing proposals.

The report is based on an analysis of more than 200 crypto assets using more than 30 attributes and covers a range of economic, legal and technological features. The researchers analyzed these assets from a variety of perspectives, including regulatory classifications, access and governance, capitalization and market size data, level of decentralization, and inventory distribution.

Charles Hayter, CEO of CryptoCompare, said: 

The everyday, retail and institutional investment communities are demonstrating a growing appetite for investing and developing investment products and instruments based on crypto assets. Key to this is the demand for a single, independent and reliable classification that provides transparency, consistency and certainty.

The centralization section of the report first sets out how regulators can approach classifying an asset as centralized and therefore secure. The fundamental point that the researchers found is that decentralized open source projects may not rely on a central issuer. Using this distinction, the researchers examined the degree to which cryptoassets are decentralized.

The results of this analysis came as a rather unpleasant surprise to cryptocurrency advocates. 

It was found that only 16% of crypto assets are truly decentralized, with 55% classified as centralized and the rest as decentralized. Even utility tokens, defined as assets intended to provide a means of payment or exchange of value that have no claim on the issuer, were only 37% considered decentralized.