Welcome to the Decentralization Research Center report, a monthly briefing on events and research relevant to decentralization, DAOs and governance.

This Month’s Updates

Key Notes

We were glad to welcome 100 industry members, academics and policymakers to the 2025 Decentralized Tech Summit, where SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, head of the SEC’s crypto task force, joined us for a fireside discussion.

To hear Commissioner Peirce’s thoughts on the rapidly changing regulatory landscape, we published our conversation on this month’s episode of the Techquitable podcast. You can listen to that here.

We’re proud to release our latest paper, Leveraging Blockchain in a New Era of Antitrust, which we published in collaboration with Flashbots. Focusing on structural advantages available through blockchain technology, the paper explains how blockchain can be used to avoid both competition-stifling monopolies and damaging ex post enforcement.

Drawing from real-world cases, including the mortgage tech industry and United States v. Google case, we demonstrate how decentralized protocols and trusted execution environments (TEEs) could offer credible, competition-enhancing alternatives that limit the regulatory oversight necessary for fair marketplaces.

You can read the full report here.

The Full Rundown

Other stories and research we’ve been tracking for you:

• Centralized Governance in Decentralized Organizations. Lin William Cong (Cornell) et al. present an in-depth empirical study on governance centralization within DAOs. The findings are striking: 76.2% of voting power is often controlled by blockvoters, with proposal managers engaging in insider trading yielding an average return of 9.5%. The paper warns that during times of crisis, this concentrated governance structure may undermine long-term value. 🔍 Read the full study.

• From Hacker to Public Servant. The team at Radical x Exchange released a documentary about Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister and architect of vTaiwan. The film walks through her personal journey, work on radical transparency and civic tech and Taiwan’s broader evolution toward democratic innovation. 📽️ Watch here.
  

• The Architecture of Global Liquidity. In this conceptual paper, independent researcher Diego Quevedo Sánchez rethinks global liquidity as a layered architecture of financial intermediation. Using the Eurodollar system, FX swaps and dealer behavior as building blocks, the paper outlines a vision for a decentralized liquidity infrastructure governed by smart contracts and dynamic validation mechanisms, paving the way for programmable monetary governance. 🌐 Explore the framework.
  

• Articulation of Blockchain-Enabled E-Voting Systems. A systematic literature review on blockchain-based e-voting. Synthesizing insights from 55 journal articles, the study breaks down components, challenges and solutions in blockchain-based election systems. 🗳️ Read the review.

I was grateful to speak with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce at the 2025 Decentralized Tech Summit, where she shared with us her thoughts on how decentralization should impact securities regulation, her work leading the SEC's Crypto Task Force and her proposed Safe Harbor. It was one of her most detailed public conversations focused solely on decentralization. You can listen to it here.

If you’re working on related research or would like to get involved in our work, please reach out to us via [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

Connor Spelliscy
Executive Director
Decentralization Research Center