🔬 DRC: February Report

ETHDenver, Congressional Update, DRC Grant, and more.

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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

DRC comes back invigorated after a week at ETHDenver, where we had the opportunity to share our vision and connect with builders, innovators, and entrepreneurs focused on shipping real infrastructure and creating real use cases.

It was also a powerful reminder: our advocacy work in Washington must continue to reflect and support the innovation happening on the ground. Policy should enable builders, not slow them down.

Kyle Bligen spoke on a few panels about DRC’s policy efforts: At SEAL’s darkMode event, he discussed advancing targeted proposals in CLARITY that go after illicit actors, without overburdening developers or undermining decentralized infrastructure. And, on the main stage, he talked about the importance of protecting developers and previewed our policy work on emerging AI issues. We look forward to continuing to advocate for protocols, developers, and entrepreneurs shaping the future of Web3 and decentralized technologies.

In further support of that effort, we met this month with both Democratic and Republican offices, emphasizing two key priorities:

• Ensuring Title III is refined so that BSA/AML requirements are not unintentionally misapplied to actors or systems where compliance is not technically possible.

• Reinforcing that the BRCA must remain in the bill. Without it, there are no meaningful protections for building in DeFi, and the legislation risks losing broad ecosystem support.

We look forward to participating in and attending the Blockchain Association DeFi fly in on Thursday, where we will be meeting with offices to ensure that developers are protected.

March 1st marks the deadline for applications for the Decentralization Research Center Grant: three grants of $5,000 each to support research teams exploring the intersection of decentralized technology, governance, and policy. We encourage all interested parties to apply for the grant here. FAQs can be found here. And our blog post below explains more.

The Deep Dive

In “Introduction to the DRC Grants Program,” Samuel Vance-Law introduces the program, explains its rationale, and offers some pointers to applicants. Here is an excerpt from this month’s DRC blog post:

Over the last few years, the DRC has gained a reputation for creating full stack responses to the decentralization issues of the day. We’re still working on that. That central concept, to create a throughline from concept to advocacy, is an approach that we would like to foster across the community. And so we started the DRC Grant, currently in its inaugural year. This blog post is to give some background on us and what we do, why we think this grants program is the natural next step, and some examples of projects that align with what we’re looking for. Hopefully, this will be helpful to applicants and other organizations considering the same issues.


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!