Decentralization

Decentralization is the degree to which control over a network is spread across many independent participants instead of being concentrated in one company or small group. It is a spectrum rather than a switch, and it applies on several axes at once: who runs the nodes, who produces blocks, how tokens are distributed, who can change the code, and who operates the infrastructure that wallets actually connect through. A chain can have thousands of nodes and still depend on a handful of mining pools, one dominant RPC provider, or a small multisig that can upgrade contracts at will. Meaningful decentralization is what makes censorship and rewriting history expensive, so it is worth checking the concrete numbers behind a project's claim rather than the marketing language.