One of the enticing features of decentralized governance is the voting power conferred to stakeholders ( miners, developers, users/participants) when it comes to making decisions that will promote the project further. Be off-chain or on-chain governance, it made investors develop the feeling of being part of the project, but with on-chain governance where voting power is based on the number of tokens in possession, one may wonder if the so-called decentralized governance applied here is different from the governance exercised by a centralized system. Take for example the recent Junoswap incident where a proposal was passed for a whale airdropped token to be reduced to the whale cap of 50k Juno. If you followed the whole incident, you will agree with me that considering the voting power of most validators and the voting power of the Junoswap team, there was no way the proposal would not be passed. I am not in support of the whale's action but at the same time, we cannot say with certainty whether he intentionally staked Atom in multiple wallets just to maximize his Airdrop share. My point here is this, no matter the number of participants that want to support the whale to retain his airdropped tokens, their voting power cannot compete with that of validators and the Junoswap team whose vote will surely be a YES. The token was indeed returned to the community pool after it was removed from the Whale wallet, but decentralized governance in this situation had many attributes of centralization.
Outside the Junoswap incident, the fact that one can delegate his voting power ( by delegating his tokens ) to another puts a big question on decentralized Governance. Some of us who have figured out that delegating to validators with higher voting power is in itself a means of promoting centralization have resulted in delegating to validators with lower stakes, but is this sufficient? Has it stopped those with higher stakes from voting proposals that will favor them more, than the blockchain?
The fact is that the term Decentralized Governance needs to be redefined. If we want to be decentralized, the proof of stake protocol should seek ways to reduce/remove the power abuse in Governance. The off-chain governance is even quite better, that some disputes can result in a "fork", thus some stakeholders' opinions are not trampled on. Whether we like it or not, the decentralized governance we practice today is still deficient in some aspects, and until a clearer part is created, there will be a lot of challenges from it.
Also posted here