Validator Parity, four years later

In February 2022 we wrote that Osmosis voting power was “highly skewed”. Four years and a lot of governance debate later, we went back to see whether anything changed.

If you missed it, the original Validator Parity post used skew and kurtosis to show how far the validator set was from an even spread. This time we track two numbers that are easier to reason about.

• Nakamoto coefficient: the smallest number of validators that together hold more than a third of voting power. That is enough to block a proposal or halt the chain. Higher is better.
• Top-10 share: the percentage of voting power held by the ten largest validators. Lower is better.

The trend

What changed

No single fix did this. A few forces worked together. Delegation programs started rewarding smaller, well-performing validators. Wallets started showing commission and governance participation next to the stake button, and some stopped sorting by voting power by default. And community dashboards, ours included, made it much easier to see who actually shows up to vote.

That last point is close to our hearts. When we started publishing validator voting history, the goal was to give delegators a reason to look past the top of the list. We cannot prove cause and effect, but the timing is encouraging.

What has not

The distribution is still far from even. The largest validators remain several times bigger than the median, and new delegators still mostly pick from the first screen of their wallet. Decentralization is a habit, not a milestone.

We will keep re-running these numbers every quarter. If you would like the same analysis for your own chain, reach out.