Whale Voting Concentration
Voting power is proportional to tokens held, so a few large holders can determine outcomes regardless of how many other participants disagree.
How it happens
One token one vote means governance ownership mirrors token distribution, and early allocations to a team, a foundation, and private investors often retain their voting rights even where they are still subject to transfer restrictions. Custodians add a second layer, because tokens deposited by customers sit in addresses the venue controls and can in principle be voted by the venue. Delegation concentrates further, since most holders who participate at all delegate to a small set of well-known delegates. Vote-incentive markets formalize the arrangement by letting third parties pay holders to direct their votes, which turns governance influence into something openly purchasable.
What you can actually observe
Look at the distribution of voting power across the top delegates and holders, and compute how many addresses are needed to reach a majority of a typical vote, which is a governance analogue of a concentration coefficient. Check whether custodial addresses have ever voted, and whether any vote-incentive market exists for the asset. Reviewing which addresses decided each past proposal is the direct test and is fully public.
Precedent
In 2020 an attempt to control the Steem network's on-chain governance using stake held at exchanges led part of the community to fork the chain into Hive, showing that custodial balances can become votes.
What makes it more or less material
Consider how many addresses constitute a majority of typical turnout, whether insider allocations vote, whether custodians vote customer tokens, and whether a vote-incentive market operates.
Related factors
Assets this applies to
The largest assets we classify in the categories this factor applies to. Presence here means the factor is relevant to that kind of asset, not that it has occurred.