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

The industry has made it clear: effective blockchain policy must incentivize decentralization. This month, we submitted our responses to the Senate Banking Committee’s RFI on their market structure discussion draft.

Our submission underscores the importance of building on the strong foundation established by the CLARITY Act; particularly its robust, control-based decentralization test. While we recognize that the Senate discussion draft is still evolving, the chart below highlights key differences between the current draft and the CLARITY Act.

The CLARITY Act’s framework provides a pathway for tokens to transition out of securities classification as they pursue decentralization and eliminate common control of related persons. It creates regulatory clarity while discouraging performative decentralization. Exactly what the industry needs.

Ultimately, sound market structure legislation must be grounded in control. That means focusing regulatory attention where it is warranted — on those who exercise discretion, custody, or unilateral power — while preserving space for innovation and open systems.

For the second DRC blog post, we are thrilled to have Helena Rong and Botao ‘Amber’ Hu join us with their insights from three of their most recent studies, in which they break down the challenges of working with — and maintaining oversight of — decentralized AI agents:

“In light of the current development of the ‘agentic web,’ we are perhaps witnessing the birth of a new digital species: decentralized AI agents (DeAgents) that train, reason, transact, and even reproduce without human-in-the-loop. Spawned by blockchains, housed in trusted execution environments (TEEs), and bankrolled by their own crypto-treasuries, these entities are designed to operate autonomously without the need or even possibility of human intervention. In theory, it removes single points of failure, monopolistic rents, or secret back doors. In practice, it means immense governance challenges that we might not be prepared for.”

The Full Rundown

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

• Kelsie Nabben focuses on how groups of people build, use, and experience infrastructure in the digital era by investigating the resilience of decentralized technologies for people that use them. This research identifies a unique practice in decentralized technologies known as “self-infrastructuring” — the ongoing processes involved in infrastructure management, including designing, building, operating, governing, and maintaining.

• Primavera De Filippi, Morshed Mannan, and Tara Merk explore the role of legitimacy in fostering user loyalty in open-source, blockchain-based metaverses which offer an innovative alternative to the exit-and-loss logic of large centralized platforms.

• This paper introduces a Commit-and-Prove SNARK (CP-SNARK) construction, Artemis, that effectively addresses the emerging challenge of commitment verification in zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML) pipelines. It adds to the growing list of tools for robust decentralized AI systems. By Hidde Lycklama, Alexander Viand, Nikolay Avramov, Nicolas Kuchler, and Anwar Hithnawi.

• Feven Mekonenn captures key conversations and presentations from the UN Open Source Conference, supplemented with analysis that connects the week's themes to broader movements in digital infrastructure, open technology, and global cooperation. It explores how open source principles might offer pathways for countries to navigate the complex terrain of technological sovereignty while maintaining the collaborative spirit essential for addressing shared global challenges.

• As data increasingly becomes a key factor of production for artificial intelligence (AI), Tianzuo Zhang proposes a blockchain-enabled, decentralized AI data-market framework.

• Primavera De Filippi and Felix Beer describe how, in the digital world, sovereignty is not tied to territorial control but to the ability to configure and govern the infrastructures that mediate digital flows. Whoever can design, maintain, or disrupt these flows — whether through routing architectures, content moderation systems, platform interfaces, or cloud-based storage — exerts a new form of power.

• This new paper explores how blockchain technology can be combined with intelligent buildings to achieve self-ownership and self-agency, and includes a prototype of exactly that. By Hongyang Wang, Jens J. Hunhevicz, and Daniel M. Hall.

• As part of a series of research notes on digital identity, Cade Diehm at the New Design Congress explores how digital identity as it is currently conceived is “a structural fraud-permissive ecosystem misrepresented as secure, precise, progressive, and, perhaps most egregiously, empowering.”

Two podcasts to listen to this month:

First, Peter Van Valkenburgh from Coin Center and David Morris of The Rage discuss the Roman Storm verdict, what that single conviction means for every non-custodial developer in crypto, and how the outcome could reshape DeFi, privacy tech, and open-source innovation for years to come.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce and Crypto Task Force Chief Counsel Mike Selig return to the Law of Code to share updates from the SEC’s Crypto Task Force — plus their thoughts on tokenized securities, market structure legislation, exemptive relief, and the role of decentralization in regulatory design.

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