CryptoCompare’s yearly report indicates a tendency to centralize crypto assets, as 85 percent of their developers can change protocols at any time.
Cryptocurrency tracking resource CryptoCompare’s recent study has shown that 85 percent of crypto assets allow development teams to alter their platforms. The report was published Wednesday, Oct. 17, on CryptoCompare’s website.
To create the report, CryptoCompare reviewed hundreds of crypto and blockchain projects, with experts detecting a tendency towards centralization set by utility tokens that are running on controlled servers.
According to the research, as many as 85 percent of developers can change the protocol on their projects at any moment at their own discretion.
The yearly taxonomy of cryptocurrencies also revealed that 55 percent of existing crypto assets are actually centralized, while 30 percent more are semi-decentralized. As a conclusion, only 16% of all existing crypto assets are considered to be a fully decentralized ecosystem. However, CryptoCompare’s total amount equals 101 percent instead of 100 percent, which might indicate a reporting error.
The situation is slightly less decentralized with tokens utilized as a method of payment. As per the report, almost 41 percent of them are centralized, while another 22 percent are centralized to some extent.
CryptoCompare’s study also reveals that most cryptocurrencies can technically be classified securities. To prove this point, they apply to the guidelines established by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA).
Following FINMA’s guidelines, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are not securities due to the lack of an identifiable common enterprise and a high level of decentralization. However, 55 percent of crypto assets could be treated as securities and fall under existing regulation, CryptoCompare states.
As Cointelegraph previously wrote, Canadian mass media and information company Thomson Reuters — which owns major international news agency Reuters — has recently partnered with CryptoCompare. The resource will provide trade data on 50 cryptocurrencies for Reuters’ financial desktop platform, Eikon, which was developed for institutional investors.