🔬 DRC: December Report

Congressional Engagement on Market Structure, Blockchain Association Policy Summit, The Year in Review, 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

Market structure discussions are continuing to develop at an accelerated pace. This month, we met with senior staff on the Senate Banking and Senate Agriculture Committees to advance our policy priorities for bipartisan digital asset market structure legislation. Discussions focused on embedding decentralization as a core regulatory principle, protecting software developers and open-source innovation, addressing consumer risks without stifling non-custodial technologies, and ensuring regulatory regimes are appropriately tailored to intermediaries rather than protocols.

Further to these efforts, DRC participated in the Blockchain Association’s record-breaking 2025 Policy Summit, joining policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders to discuss the future of digital asset regulation in Washington. The Summit underscored growing bipartisan momentum around market structure clarity, responsible innovation, and U.S. competitiveness in blockchain technology.

We co-hosted a farewell reception honoring CFTC Acting Chair Pham where we had the opportunity to engage directly with CFTC officials and Senate Agriculture Committee staff. Conversations centered on digital asset classification, the limits of existing regulatory frameworks, and the need to ensure agencies have the capacity and statutory authority to propose and enforce responsible, effective rules for digital asset markets.

DRC also attended the SEC’s Roundtable on Financial Surveillance and Privacy, engaging with industry panelists and SEC staff on the intersection of privacy, compliance, and financial innovation. We highlighted the importance of preserving civil liberties and data minimization while pursuing legitimate enforcement objectives, particularly as surveillance tools expand in digital asset markets.

The month is not over yet. We are excited for tomorrow's PGP* (Pretty Good Policy) for Crypto meeting, where you can hear Tony Douglas Jr. and Kyle Bligen speak live or online.

The Deep Dive

In “Some Reflections on a Defining Year for DRC,” Co-Founder Tony Douglas looks back at the history of DRC, how 2025 was a defining year for the orgnanization, and the challenges that lie ahead. Here is an excerpt from this month’s DRC blog post:

When we started this organization in 2021, we were guided by a conviction that emerging technologies, especially blockchain, could help bring more equitable governance and ownership to the digital economy, enabling broader economic participation through more disintermediated systems.

At the time, our work was necessarily focused. As the “DAO Research Collective,” we concentrated on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations as a new organizational form - one that challenged long-standing assumptions in law, economics, computer science, organizational design and political theory. Through workshops and collaborative research, we brought together scholars and practitioners across disciplines to better understand how decentralization works in practice, not just in theory.

Those early years were shaped as much by generosity as by inquiry. From the beginning, our work benefited from the intellectual contributions of people who cared deeply about blockchain’s original promise: decentralized control, open and permissionless access, user sovereignty, credible neutrality, and transparency. Many contributed their time, insight, and energy simply because they believed this work mattered.

As our research matured, so did our understanding of decentralization’s relevance.


Continue reading here…

The Full Rundown

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

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!