Stefano Balietti, Pietro Saggese, Markus Strohmaier
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) replace formal managerial authority with collective decision-making, by handing both proposal rights and token-weighted votes directly to community members. Yet, as in corporate votes, where management sets the agenda and its proposals rarely fail, DAO votes are strikingly one-sided. Using 127 281 proposals and about 51 million votes cast on Snapshot, the leading off-chain DAO voting platform, between 2020 and 2023, we ask which features of the ballot are associated with this support. We relate each choice's voting-power share to three observable features: its position in the list, whether its stance expresses approval, and whether the proposal author selected it. Each identifies one voting bias: position bias, approval bias, and author-selected choice bias. Author-selected choices show the strongest and most robust association, receiving a voting-power share 58.8 percentage points higher than non-author-selected ones, compared with 27.1 percentage points for approving choices and 7.7 percentage points for first-listed ones. About one third of the author bias comes from the author's own voting power; that advantage is smaller in the largest protocols and in proposals with higher participation. The results are robust across alternative specifications and outcomes. Our findings suggest that the agenda power that management holds in corporate voting persists even without a formal hierarchy, and that ballot design and the visibility of proposers' preferences are governance choices rather than neutral implementation details.
Pietro Saggese, Michael Sigmund, Burkhard Raunig, Esther Segalla, Bernhard Haslhofer, Christos Makridis
Stablecoins are increasingly entangled with traditional finance, making their response to stress a financial stability concern. However, blockchain pseudonymity and the lack of geographic identifiers force existing work to rely on indirect proxies to infer and locate market participants. In this paper, we exploit a regulatory registry that directly identifies the on-chain addresses of every crypto-asset service provider (CASP) registered in Austria at the end of 2024, reconstructing their Bitcoin, Ether, USDT, and USDC activity through May 2025. Austrian CASPs intermediate roughly $30 billion in cumulative external transfers, while transfers among them are negligible. Combining two transaction-level signals, interaction with CASP cold wallets and on-chain transaction frequency, we classify CASP counterparty activity as retail-like or institutionally mediated. Around stress events, the two groups exhibit distinct flow responses that are obscured in aggregate data. After the FTX bankruptcy, we observe retail-like withdrawals and institutional deposits across assets. After Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failure, retail-like USDC deposits and institutionally mediated withdrawals are consistent with USDC's asymmetric redemption access. Registry-based, transaction-level measurements thus offer a reproducible basis for cross-jurisdictional monitoring of how cryptoasset markets transmit risk.