🔬 DRC: April Report

EY Global Blockchain Summit, Stablecoin Privacy Summit, AI Agents, Protocol Freezes, Protocolized Institutions, and more.

DAO Research Collective Logo

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

This past month, DRC hosted Policy Day at the EY 10th Annual Global Blockchain Summit, and the takeaway was clear: digital asset policy is entering a consequential phase.

The conversation is no longer about whether digital assets are here to stay. It’s about whether policymakers and regulators can deliver rules that provide clarity, support innovation, and preserve the core benefits of decentralized technologies.

Kyle Bligen joined Ji Kim, Ashok Pinto, and Sarah Brennan to discuss the latest on the CLARITY Act and what meaningful market structure legislation could unlock.

We also heard strong insights from Steve Yelderman and Tom Lee on institutional adoption, Marina Markezic on EU regulatory developments, and Tony Douglas Jr. and Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos on the barriers facing L2s and their critical role in the ecosystem.

We were especially glad to host Taylor Lindman for his first public engagement since becoming Chief Counsel of the SEC's Crypto Task Force, where he and Kyle discussed the SEC’s new interpretive guidance and regulatory agenda.

Taylor Lindman in discussion with Kyle Bligen

Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos with Tony Douglas Jr.

We were also proud to sponsor the Stablecoin Privacy Summit last week, where Kyle spoke on the need to take illicit finance and national security seriously to protect the economic viability of protocols and safeguard consumer funds.

The grants process is now fully underway and it’s been a great pleasure to get to know the teams and their work. You can read more in the blog section below.

The Deep Dive

In “An Intro to the Grantees: AI Agents, Protocol Freezes, and Protocolized Institutions,” we introduce the three projects that received grant funding for our first ever DRC grants round. Here is an excerpt from this month’s DRC blog post:

Earlier this year, we announced the DRC Grants Program. The idea was to support research that connects technology, governance, and policy in the service of decentralization, and to support the community doing that work beyond our own team. We wrote a bit about who we are and what we were looking for in the introductory blog post. This post is to introduce the three projects we selected. 

The projects span AI agent identity, blockchain security governance, and the broader emergence of what one team calls “protocolized institutions.” They come from different disciplinary backgrounds and address different domains, but they all share qualities we value. Each one identifies a concrete governance problem, grounds it in the current situation, and makes the case that decentralized approaches offer something that centralized alternatives cannot. Below are short descriptions of each project in the grantees’ own words.


Continue reading 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!