Swimming with Whales: Analysis of Power Imbalances in Stake-Weighted Governance
Authors: Yuzhe Zhang, Manvir Schneider, Qin Wang et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 19264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Voting methods weighted by stakes are the fundamental governance paradigm in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains.
Relevance
Read next because Swimming with Whales: Analysis of Power Imbalances in Stake-Weighted Governance overlaps with clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)", clean result "Coupling evil personas with wrong answers fails to protect Qwen2.5-7B from EM-induced alignment collapse — and the apparent capability ordering across coupling conditions is mostly eval contamination (LOW confidence)", clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)". Matching terms: under, alignment, rate, project, control, without, chain. Source: arxiv cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Abstract
arXiv:2605.19264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Voting methods weighted by stakes are the fundamental governance paradigm in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. Such a paradigm is known to be prone to power distortions: a few users possessing large stakes may completely control decision making, even without owning the totality of the stakes. We study this phenomenon through the lens of computational social choice, focusing on the extent of power imbalances in stake-weighted voting when power is quantified using the Penrose-Banzhaf power index. Our work presents both analytical and empirical contributions. Analytically, we demonstrate that while a perfect alignment between power and relative stake ownership is generally unattainable, it can be approximated in expectation under specific conditions. Empirically, using data from a real-world on-chain governance system (Project Catalyst), we provide a more fine-grained understanding of the power imbalances that are likely to occur in current stake-weighted governance systems.