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 month, we met with Senate Agriculture Committee Majority and Minority staff to discuss the appropriate regulatory framework for evaluating decentralized systems under the Commodity Exchange Act as part of the Agriculture title of the CLARITY Act. Our conversations focused on ensuring that any decentralization framework administered by the CFTC reflects the distinct statutory and regulatory regime governing commodity markets, as well as the technical realities of decentralized blockchain networks, rather than importing standards designed for traditional financial intermediaries.

We also engaged with international partners to review the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) targeted report on regulatory challenges associated with decentralized finance and develop a coordinated strategy for engagement with relevant regulators and policymakers. Our work is focused on educating policymakers on the spectrum of decentralization across DeFi systems and ensuring that regulatory frameworks appropriately distinguish among different technical architectures, governance structures, and degrees of control rather than treating decentralized technologies as a single, uniform category.

Kyle spoke at the BlockVoices Thought Leadership Summit, joining Ayana Dow, Senior Counsel at the DeFi Education Fund, for a conversation on the future of digital asset innovation in the United States. He discussed the importance of creating an environment where developers and entrepreneurs can build innovative companies domestically and emphasized the need for Congress to pass the CLARITY Act and for regulators to establish durable rules of the road. The conversation highlighted how a well-designed regulatory framework can simultaneously promote responsible innovation, strengthen consumer protections, provide greater certainty for builders, and expand access to and adoption of decentralized technologies.

The Full Rundown

Further reading from the space:

• Tara Merk, Primavera De Filippi, Morshed Mannan, Nathan Schneider, and Danny Spitzberg have launched How to Exit to Community: A Cookbook for Blockchain Communities. Drawing on 14 real-world decentralization processes in the blockchain industry, it maps the flavors, recipes, tools and traps of Exit to Community: a strategy to transition governance of a project to the people who give it its value.

• Stefaan Verhulst, Adam Zable, Andrew J. Zahuranec, Begoña G. Otero, and Sarah Marcucci have released A Roadmap for Digital Self-Determination in Data Spaces, providing a path for people and communities to have meaningful agency over how data about them—or relevant to them—is collected, accessed, shared and reused.

• Law of Code does a deep dive on Reg Crypto with an all-star legal cast including the DRC’s own Sarah Brennan.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Daly Barnett argues that zero-knowledge proofs do not fix age verification. Whoever is licensed to attest to age becomes a chokepoint able to revoke access, and the EU rollout currently ships with the proofs switched off and a replay bypass already found.

• Petter Bae Brandtzaeg answers Zuckerberg's superintelligence essay in No Zuckerberg, The Future is Not Just For Individuals. Personal agents create an illusion of decentralization, since power looks individual while staying concentrated in the compute and models those agents run on.

• Lisa Dusseault surveys IETF work related to personal data portability. AT Protocol now has its own working group, and AI agent delegation is forcing OAuth reform, because trust rather than data formats is portability's binding constraint.

• Vitalik Buterin welcomes Signal's phone-number-free registration and then argues it stops short of anonymity. Metadata plus AI inference kills persistent pseudonyms, leaving message-by-message unlinkability as the only true privacy standard still available.

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!