6 of 12 top coins are officially centralized
I won't get love for this one... but anyway!
Out of the top twelve coins by market cap, six are ran 100% centrally by the founding organizations:
- Ripple (Ripple company decides who is the validator - the so called UNL)
- NEO (7 trusted nodes controlled by a single party)
- Cardano (in the "Bootstrap Era" before target dPoS)
- Stellar (edited: this one is a bit nuanced - it feels like a Web-of-Trust with the trust firmly anchored in Stellar Development Foundation; Stellar documentation underlines legal compliance and not censorship resistance; the Stellar Whitepaper states: "In practice, the top tier could consist of anywhere from four to dozens of widely known and trusted financial institutions") - so it is basically based on trusted parties cooperating
- IOTA (the "Coordinator")
- NEM (the Network Infrastructure Server (NIS) is not open source)bold