Thread by @dimiandre

1/ In this new episode of Governance in Cosmos: let's talk about Kava proposal #96 and the general governance situation on that "decentralized" blockchain.

The proposal has been rejected a few hours ago, and I took some time to extract on-chain data and see what happened 🧐

2/ What was the proposal about?

Tharsis (creator of Evmos) is asking around ~6M USD for funding and development of the core EVM technology that also Kava is using on their mainnet.

Full text here reddit.com/r/kava_platfor…

3/ By looking at the proposal results, you can immediately notice a few interesting facts

- Almost all validators, even with big delegations, voted for YES
- Only 15% of the voting addresses voted for NO
- 60% of the voting power is on the NO side

🤔 how is this possible?

4/ The answer come very quickly, directly from Kava Labs team that shared the reasons why they voted NO in this Twitter thread

https://twitter.com/Scott_Stuart_/status/1563228443436728321

I don't want if the proposal is good for kava or not, it's not the intent of this thread.

5/ What we can see here is that Kava Labs control over 40M $KAVA and they actively participate in governance, voting almost every time

Speaking of numbers, ~40M Kava is equal to ~35% of all staked assets.

You can find a recap of votes here:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

6/ Looking back again at the proposal, and the final tally result you can notice how basically they are the only ones who voted NO.

Is it normal that what should be a decentralized chain is in reality controlled by a bunch of addresses all under the same entity?

7/ What do we have governance for if a single entity can change the result of any proposal at any time?

I understand why Kava is like this, but I don't justify it and I'd prefer to see some steps to move towards a more decentralized way of doing things.

8/ The only way to prevent situations like this again is by increasing governance engagement and participation by a few orders of magnitude, we need at least 95% of all the token staked voting to compensate for this huge influence from the core company.

9/ I have never been a fan of Kava, now I'm even less.

All of what you read in this thread is purely my opinion and does not represent stakefish, which may have a totally different view on this topic.