Short answer: What is decentralized technology? On the working definition used here, built on Vitalik Buterin’s 2017 idea of political decentralization, it is software and infrastructure whose records and rules are kept by many independent parties, so that no single company, government or person can rewrite them, shut them down or lock a user out alone. It is a matter of degree. As of November 2026, three mining pools found most Bitcoin blocks, 18 validators held a third of Solana’s stake and two companies issued 84 percent of dollar stablecoins.
Key facts (as of November 2026)
- The measure: Balaji Srinivasan and Leland Lee proposed the Nakamoto coefficient in July 2017: count how many entities one would need to compromise to control each critical subsystem (David Rosenthal’s summary; Axelsen, Jensen and Ross).
- Bitcoin: Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool found 62.7 percent of blocks in the month to November 9, 2026 (mempool.space).
- Solana: 18 vote accounts held 34.2 percent of stake on November 9, 2026 (validators.solutions; the public RPC gave the same).
- Bittensor: a filing dated August 24, 2026 says a three-seat triumvirate holds the chain’s sudo keys and that staking carries no on-chain vote (Blockworks).
- Stablecoins: USDT and USDC were 83.9 percent of $294.6 billion of dollar stablecoins on November 9, 2026 (DefiLlama).
- Law: the Fifth Circuit held on November 26, 2024 that Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts are not property the Treasury could block (Van Loon v. Treasury).
In this article: What it is | What decentralization means | Decentralized vs centralized | How to measure it | Six networks | Is crypto decentralized? | Why it matters | FAQ
What is decentralized technology?
Decentralized technology is any system in which the power to keep the record, change the rules and admit or refuse users is spread across parties who do not answer to one another. A bank’s ledger is the opposite case: one institution keeps it, and that institution can close your account.
The word is also a marketing claim, which is why this page tests it. Ryan Bethencourt’s Decentralized Revolution Series takes one idea per book: privacy, intelligence, speed, ownership, attention and open markets. Each section below asks what power moved, from whom, and what recentralized anyway.
What is decentralization?
Decentralization means that no single party can decide for everyone. Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, separated three meanings in a 2017 essay, The Meaning of Decentralization, as summarized by Axelsen, Jensen and Ross and a University of Warsaw lab.
- Architectural: how many computers the system is made up of.
- Political: how many individuals or organizations control those computers.
- Logical: whether the system’s interface and data structures work as one object or many.
In his framework, as Roxine Kee summarized it in 2023, blockchains are politically and architecturally decentralized but logically centralized. The political axis is the one this page measures.
Decentralized vs centralized: what is the difference?
The difference is who can say no. A centralized service has an operator that can change the terms, freeze an account or switch the product off. A decentralized network spreads those powers out, and users accept slower upgrades and more personal responsibility in exchange.
| Question | Centralized service | Decentralized network |
|---|---|---|
| Who keeps the record? | One operator’s database | Many independent copies that must agree |
| Who can change the rules? | The company | Whoever the network’s process empowers: developers, validators, token holders |
| Who can lock you out? | The operator, by choice or under a court order | No one at the protocol level; the services around it often can |
| What if the operator disappears? | The service usually ends | The network keeps running while enough participants remain |
How do you measure who really holds the power?
Count how many parties would have to act together to stop or capture each essential part of the system. That is the idea behind the Nakamoto coefficient. Srinivasan and Lee’s July 2017 essay, as David Rosenthal described it in 2018, starts from the point that a decentralized system is compromised if any of its subsystems is, and its measure counts how many entities one would need to compromise to control each.
Applied across these networks, the method becomes five questions:
- Who can stop it? The smallest group able to halt the chain or the application.
- Who can change the rules? Keys, multisignature wallets, foundations and upgrade votes.
- Who can freeze or see your money? Stablecoin issuers, exchanges and anyone reading a public ledger.
- Who controls the door? Websites, wallets, hosting companies and the services that talk to the chain for you.
- Who holds the supply? Stake, tokens and whatever insiders kept.
Two cautions apply. Researchers at Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology wrote in The State of Solana, published in October 2026, that cross-chain comparisons “should be interpreted cautiously” because studies count different entities. And a validator count measures accounts, not owners, since one operator can run several.
What are examples of decentralized technology?
The examples here are the six networks this series covers, plus the AI agents being built on top of them. Each moved a real power away from an institution and left, or grew, a place where control still sits.
| Idea and network | What it decentralized | Where control remains | Evidence and date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Privacy Zcash |
Who can see a payment: shielded addresses hide sender, receiver and amount | Mining pools and the small group able to coordinate an emergency fix; most coins remain outside the shielded pools | About 79 percent of hash rate sat with ViaBTC, Foundry and F2Pool on June 2, 2026 (CriptoNoticias, citing MiningPoolStats). On November 12, 2026, the same three pools had found 67.5 percent of the last 1,000 blocks (MiningPoolStats). Shielded ZEC was 29.1 percent of supply at the end of Q3 2026 (Blockworks). |
| Intelligence Bittensor |
Who gets paid for machine intelligence, and who decides which work earns it | A three-seat triumvirate with the sudo keys; root stake held by a few validators | The triumvirate holds the sudo keys, per Blockworks (August 24, 2026). Two validators held 35.2 percent of root stake on November 9, 2026 (query to the public Bittensor RPC, 14:47 UTC). |
| Speed Solana |
Who runs settlement: a public ledger in place of a private processor | Stake, hosting and client software | 18 vote accounts held 34.2 percent of stake on November 9, 2026 (validators.solutions). One network provider carried about 29 percent of stake in October 2026 (Fidelity FCAT). |
| Ownership NFTs |
Who keeps the ownership record: a public ledger in place of a platform’s database | Where the file lives, who pays to keep it online and who runs the marketplace | 9.06 percent of 12.36 million NFTs in an Ethereum data set were stored fully on chain (Right Click Save, June 20, 2022). KnownOrigin’s pinning payments end January 31, 2027 (KnownOrigin). |
| Attention Memecoins and Pump.fun |
Who can issue a token: anyone with a wallet | Who buys first, who holds the supply and the launch venue itself | Dune data put tokens reaching Raydium near 1.4 percent of all Pump.fun launches in August 2024 (The Block). Pump.fun and PumpSwap had earned about $1.37 billion by November 9, 2026 (DefiLlama). |
| Open markets DeFi and Hyperliquid |
Who can trade, lend or list a market without a broker | Stablecoin issuers, validators and the websites around the contracts | USDT and USDC were 83.9 percent of dollar stablecoins on November 9, 2026 (DefiLlama). Five validators named for the Hyper Foundation held 47.4 percent of staked HYPE (Hyperliquid API, validatorSummaries). |
| What comes next AI agents and x402 |
Who can pay and be paid without a bank account | Who holds the keys and who issues the dollars | 99.3 percent of x402 agent-payment volume settled in USDC (Circle, August 5, 2026). |
Privacy: Zcash
Zcash moved the power to see a payment away from whoever reads the ledger, a story told in ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin. Control came back through mining. When a counterfeiting flaw surfaced in the Orchard pool, developers gave pool operators a patch that stopped Orchard transactions, and the pause took effect on June 2, 2026. CriptoNoticias argued that three actors were enough to carry it out, because ViaBTC, Foundry and F2Pool then held about 79 percent of hash rate. By November 12, 2026, their share of the last 1,000 blocks was 67.5 percent. Josh Swihart, ZODL’s founder, said in an account reported by The Block that ViaBTC and Foundry played a key role in coordinating the response.
Zcash also has counterweights. Nearly 2.4 million ZEC, about two-thirds of the eligible supply, voted in an encrypted coinholder poll on the NU7 upgrade, and coinholders control a development fund that receives 12 percent of block rewards, by Blockworks’ Q3 2026 report. Jacob Gadikian, a developer who explained the fix on X, said miners adopted it voluntarily, and one critic quoted by CriptoNoticias answered that censorship resistance leaves no room for pause buttons.
Intelligence: Bittensor
Bittensor moved the power to decide which machine work gets paid from a lab’s managers to a market of miners, validators and subnet tokens, the story of TAO: The Bittensor Story and the Rise of Decentralized Intelligence. Control remains at the base layer. Blockworks’ August 24, 2026 filing says the triumvirate holds the chain’s sudo keys through a two-of-three multisig, that its members are Opentensor Foundation employees, and that “Staking confers no onchain governance vote”. At 14:47 UTC on November 9, 2026, a plain query to the public Bittensor RPC showed a sudo key still set and two of the 64 validators on the root network holding 35.2 percent of the 5.48 million TAO staked there. More is in what Bittensor is and who controls it.
In April 2026 Sam Dare of Covenant AI left and said, “It is decentralization theatre” (The Block). FalconX wrote that “many of the allegations were dispelled by Steeves”, and Jacob Steeves later published a plan to decentralize fully by about December 2027 (Crypto Briefing). A governance guide last updated on August 3, 2026 says the planned system “is not yet deployed on mainnet” (Bittensor guide).
Speed: Solana
Solana moved high-speed settlement from private processors onto a public ledger, and LIGHT: The Solana Story and the Man Who Turned Time Into Code tells how. Running a validator is a business: Fidelity researchers said annual operating costs “can start at around $60,000”. On November 9, 2026, the network had 697 vote accounts, down from the 1,414 validators that a Helius study counted at epoch 685, around October 2024, and 18 of them held 34.2 percent of stake.
The same researchers found that the one-third line ran through two countries and two network providers, and that one provider carried about 29 percent of stake, above the 25 percent ceiling in the Solana Foundation’s delegation program. In August 2026 a routing failure took about 90 validators offline for 33 minutes and came within about 4.5 percentage points of that line.
The headline number is also aging, because one-third is the threshold of Solana’s old consensus. Alpenglow, whose first phase went live on October 21, 2026, describes a “20+20 security model” in its design proposal, which says it “does not have the 33% byzantine security” of two-round protocols and accepts that for 40 percent crash resilience. Ranking the public RPC’s getVoteAccounts list by activated stake at 14:44 UTC on November 9, 2026, eight vote accounts held more than 20 percent of stake (21.5 percent) and 25 held more than 40 percent (40.6 percent).
Ownership: NFTs
NFTs moved the record of who owns a digital work from a platform’s database to a public ledger, the subject of PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable. The record moved and the file often did not. In a count of 12,359,778 NFTs from one Ethereum data set, published on June 20, 2022, Nick Hladek found 9.06 percent stored entirely on chain, 49.55 percent on IPFS and 40.70 percent behind ordinary web addresses. The full picture is in where NFT art is stored.
Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, showed the weak point on January 7, 2022. He made an NFT that changes “based on who is looking at it”, and after a few days, “without warning or explanation”, OpenSea removed it. The token stayed on the blockchain, and it no longer appeared in any wallet on his device.
Attention: memecoins
Memecoins moved the power to issue a token from exchange listing desks and venture rounds to anyone with a wallet, the subject of DOGE: Memes and the Joke That Ate Wall Street. Control moved to whoever stood closest to the launch and to the launch venue itself. Dune data cited by The Block in August 2024 showed about 1.4 percent of launches reaching the Raydium exchange, while Pump.fun and its PumpSwap exchange had earned about $1.37 billion in revenue by November 9, 2026, by DefiLlama’s count.
The TRUMP coin shows the same shape at the top. Its official site says two companies, Fight Fight Fight LLC and CIC Digital LLC, own 80 percent of the supply, subject to a three-year unlock. Nansen counted 988,905 wallets with losses by the end of June 2026, while profits went mostly to “a small number of early buyers” (The New York Times, via GV Wire).
Open markets: DeFi
DeFi moved the exchange, the loan and the listing decision from brokers and banks into public code, the subject of HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market. Three layers stayed in few hands. The first is money: USDT and USDC were 83.9 percent of $294.6 billion of dollar stablecoins on November 9, 2026, and their issuers can freeze addresses. BlockSec counted $5.69 billion of USDT frozen across 9,597 addresses by July 26, 2026.
The second is the chain. On Hyperliquid, 27 validators were active out of 35 registered on November 9, 2026. The three largest, all named for the Hyper Foundation, held 36.1 percent of staked HYPE, and the five named for it held 47.4 percent. Hyperliquid’s documentation defines a quorum as more than two-thirds of stake, so by that arithmetic those three could stop one from forming. On March 26, 2025, Hyperliquid’s validator set “convened and voted” to remove the JELLY contract (The Block). Our review of Hyperliquid (publishing December 29) has the detail.
The third is the door. When the US Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash on August 8, 2022, its domain went down, GitHub removed its repository and Circle froze about $75,000 of USDC (Wikipedia). The contracts kept running, as the Fifth Circuit later noted. Treasury lifted the sanctions on March 21, 2025.
The sanctions could reach the people and companies around the code: a website, a repository, a stablecoin issuer. Somebody could press stop on all of those. Nobody could press stop on the contracts.
What comes next: AI agents
AI agents are the next test of the five questions: software that can hold a wallet and pay with no bank account, the subject of AGENT: AI, Money and the Rise of the Non-Human Economy. The x402 payment protocol, created by Coinbase, moved to a Linux Foundation body announced on April 2, 2026. Circle reported on August 5, 2026 that 99.3 percent of x402 agent-payment volume settled in USDC.
Then come the keys. Andy Ayrey told CoinDesk in December 2024 that decisions about Truth Terminal’s wallet came from “me having a discussion with it”. On September 9, 2026, TRM Labs put the share of screened x402 commerce that appeared to be agentic between 0.6 and 7.5 percent, on $25.62 million examined, so by that count most of it did not look like agents at all.
Is crypto actually decentralized?
Partly, and less than its marketing says. Bitcoin and Ethereum have no company that can rewrite their ledgers, and that is a real achievement. The layers around them have consolidated.
| Layer | Reading | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin mining | Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool found 62.7 percent of blocks in the prior month | mempool.space, November 9, 2026 |
| Ethereum staking | Lido held about 9.72 million of 44.5 million staked ETH, or 21.8 percent | DefiLlama; Validator Queue, November 9, 2026 |
| Ethereum block building | Titan and Quasar built 69.9 percent of MEV-Boost blocks in seven days | relayscan, seven days to November 9, 2026 |
| Ethereum layer 2 | Base, the largest by value secured at about $13.95 billion, is Stage 1; its contracts are upgradable by a two-of-two multisig with “no delay on upgrades” | ETHBEAT, formerly L2BEAT; Base page, November 9, 2026 |
| Bitcoin ETF custody | Crypto Briefing reported that Coinbase held roughly 80 to 84 percent of US bitcoin ETF assets, about $74 billion of $91.7 billion, a dominance it says Bitwise has highlighted | Crypto Briefing, August 4, 2026 |
The critics saw this early. Moxie Marlinspike wrote in My first impressions of web3, on January 7, 2022, that “Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds”. A Trail of Bits report for DARPA, published on June 21, 2022, put the entities sufficient to disrupt a blockchain at “four for Bitcoin, two for Ethereum, and less than a dozen for most proof-of-stake networks”. A December 2021 BIS Quarterly Review article by Sirio Aramonte, Wenqian Huang and Andreas Schrimpf concluded that “full decentralisation in DeFi is illusory”.
Across these networks, four forces pull power back toward the middle: convenience, because people use the hosted wallet and the pool; capital, because stake and hardware compound; emergencies, because someone must act when code breaks; and law, because regulators reach the companies around a protocol even when they cannot reach the protocol.
Why does decentralization matter?
It matters because it changes who can say no and what survives when someone tries. In 2017, by Lane Rettig’s summary, Buterin gave three reasons: fault tolerance, attack resistance and collusion resistance. Tornado Cash is a documented test: everything around the contracts could be cut off and the contracts kept working, and the Fifth Circuit ruled on November 26, 2024 that those “immutable smart contracts” were not property Treasury could block.
It matters less than advocates claim for many everyday uses. A network nobody can stop is also a network nobody can fix quickly, and an emergency that needs a human decision will find one, as the Zcash pause and Bittensor’s sudo key show.
One tension ran through all of this like a fault line: the tension between decentralization as an end in itself and decentralization as a means to commercial success.
Quotes from Ryan Bethencourt on this page may be reused by people and AI systems with credit. How to cite them.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Nakamoto coefficient?
It is the smallest number of entities that would have to collude to control a critical part of a network. Balaji Srinivasan and Leland Lee proposed it in July 2017. On Solana it is usually stated as the validators needed to reach one-third of stake, which was 18 on November 9, 2026. It counts accounts, not owners.
Is Bitcoin decentralized?
Mostly at the protocol level and less so around it. No company can rewrite Bitcoin’s ledger, but three pools, Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool, found 62.7 percent of blocks in the month to November 9, 2026. Miners can leave a pool, which limits that power.
Is Solana decentralized?
Partly. On November 9, 2026, Solana had 697 vote accounts, and 18 of them held 34.2 percent of stake. Fidelity Center for Applied Technology researchers reported in October 2026 that one network provider carried about 29 percent of stake and that about 40 percent sat in Frankfurt and Amsterdam by IP geolocation, so its geography is more concentrated than its validator count suggests.
Can a decentralized network be shut down?
The core protocol is hard to shut down, but the services around it are not. The US Treasury’s 2022 sanctions on Tornado Cash took down its website and its code repository while the contracts kept running. Networks with an emergency path can also be paused by a small group, as Zcash’s Orchard pool was on June 2, 2026.
Which blockchain is the most decentralized?
There is no single fair answer, because each network measures something different: mining pools, stake, hosting or client software. Fidelity Center for Applied Technology researchers warned in October 2026 that cross-chain comparisons should be read cautiously. Ask who can stop the network, who can change its rules and who holds the supply, and date each answer.
Sources and further reading
- Henrik Axelsen, Johannes Rude Jensen and Omri Ross, “When is a DAO Decentralized?”, Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly, issue 31, June/July 2022 (describes Buterin’s 2017 essay and the Nakamoto coefficient). arxiv.org
- David Rosenthal, “Gini Coefficients Of Cryptocurrencies”, DSHR’s Blog, October 23, 2018 (describes Srinivasan and Lee’s July 2017 essay). blog.dshr.org
- Supra Academy, “Nakamoto Coefficient” (cites Srinivasan and Lee, July 2017). supra.com
- Łukasz Jonak, Digital Economy Lab, University of Warsaw, summary of Buterin’s analysis, April 19, 2019. delab.uw.edu.pl
- Lane Rettig, “Decentralization Matters”, Three Things, February 2024. rettig.substack.com
- Roxine Kee, “Why decentralization matters (according to Vitalik Buterin)”, Rox’s Picks, June 16, 2023. roxine.beehiiv.com
- Moxie Marlinspike, “My first impressions of web3”, January 7, 2022. moxie.org
- Trail of Bits, “Are blockchains decentralized?”, June 21, 2022. blog.trailofbits.com
- Bank for International Settlements, Aramonte, Huang and Schrimpf, “DeFi risks and the decentralisation illusion”, December 6, 2021. bis.org
- Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, Mia Galvin and Kevin Kelly, “The State of Solana: Network Health and Resilience”, October 2026 (PDF). fcatalyst.com
- Solana public RPC (api.mainnet-beta.solana.com), getVoteAccounts, ranked by activated stake, read 14:44 UTC November 9, 2026; validators.solutions decentralization page (updated November 9, 2026, 11:27 UTC). validators.solutions
- Helius, “Measuring Solana’s Decentralization: Facts and Figures” (epoch 685). helius.dev
- SIMD-0326, Alpenglow proposal; Cointelegraph, launch report, October 21, 2026. github.com
- mempool.space mining pools API, one-month window, read 14:44 UTC November 9, 2026. mempool.space
- DefiLlama: stablecoins, Lido, Pump.fun and PumpSwap revenue APIs, read 14:44 UTC November 9, 2026. defillama (API)
- Validator Queue, staked ETH, read 14:44 UTC November 9, 2026; relayscan, seven-day builder share, read 14:44 UTC November 9, 2026. validatorqueue.com
- ETHBEAT (formerly L2BEAT), scaling summary and Base project page, read November 9, 2026. ethbeat.org
- Blockworks Advisory, Zcash Token Holder Report, Q3 2026 (PDF). blockworks.com
- Miguel Arroyo, CriptoNoticias, on Zcash mining concentration, June 4, 2026 (citing MiningPoolStats). criptonoticias.com
- MiningPoolStats, Zcash mining pools, blocks found in the last 1,000 blocks, read 14:34 UTC November 12, 2026. miningpoolstats.stream
- The Block, on ZODL’s account of the Zcash emergency upgrade, June 8, 2026. theblock.co
- Bittensor public RPC (entrypoint-finney.opentensor.ai), Sudo.Key and SubtensorModule Keys and TotalHotkeyAlpha for netuid 0, read 14:47 UTC November 9, 2026, block 9,469,326.
- Blockworks Token Transparency, Bittensor filing, August 24, 2026. blockworks.com
- Bittensor release process documentation and governance guide, read November 2026. bittensor.com
- The Block, Covenant AI exits Bittensor, April 9, 2026. theblock.co
- FalconX, State of Bittensor, May 13, 2026; Crypto Briefing, Bittensor roadmap, June 22, 2026. falconx.io
- Nick Hladek, “How many NFTs are actually on the blockchain?”, Right Click Save, June 20, 2022. rightclicksave.com
- KnownOrigin, closing notice and pinning commitment, read November 9, 2026. knownorigin.io
- The Block, Pump.fun fees and tokens reaching Raydium, August 9, 2024. theblock.co
- Official TRUMP site, read November 9, 2026; The New York Times via GV Wire, July 4, 2026. gettrumpmemes.com
- BlockSec, USDT freeze data, July 26, 2026. blocksec.com
- Hyperliquid public API, POST api.hyperliquid.xyz/info with type validatorSummaries, read 14:44 UTC November 9, 2026 (query reference); staking documentation. hyperliquid.gitbook.io
- The Block, Hyperliquid delists JELLY, March 26, 2025. theblock.co
- US Treasury, Tornado Cash sanctions, August 8, 2022; Tornado Cash delisting, March 21, 2025. home.treasury.gov
- Wikipedia, “Tornado Cash”, read November 9, 2026. en.wikipedia.org
- US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury, November 26, 2024 (PDF). ca5.uscourts.gov
- Linux Foundation, x402 Foundation announcement, April 2, 2026. linuxfoundation.org
- Circle, second-quarter 2026 results, August 5, 2026 (PDF). q4cdn.com
- TRM Labs, “Who’s Actually Paying? Measuring AI Agent Payments Onchain”, September 9, 2026. trmlabs.com
- CoinDesk, Truth Terminal profile, December 10, 2024. coindesk.com
- Crypto Briefing, “Coinbase dominates custody for majority of spot ETFs, says Bitwise”, August 4, 2026. cryptobriefing.com
More on Grey Area Labs
- Crypto and Web3 guides
- Books by Ryan Bethencourt
- The best books on crypto history, by topic
- Zero-knowledge proofs explained
- Every Solana outage, dated (publishing December 17)
- What happened to cultured meat
Published November 13, 2026. Network readings taken November 9 and 12, 2026, and governance and legal status as of November 2026; each is dated where it appears.