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

On the 2nd of April, we will be hosting the 2025 Decentralized Tech Summit in Washington D.C., convening 100 leading academics, industry experts, and policymakers to explore both the evolving landscape of decentralized technologies and the policies shaping their future. If you would like to attend, please apply here. While attendance is limited, it is free for everyone selected.

We present our interim report, “How Can Data Cooperatives Help Build a Fair Data Economy?” in partnership with the Project Liberty Institute, introducing data cooperatives as a model that could enable individuals and communities to have a voice, choice, and stake in the digital economy. We would especially like to extend our thanks to all the experts whose insights made this report possible.

With our focus running up to the Decentralized Tech Summit zeroing in on decentralized technologies, we take a look at the Edinburgh Decentralisation Index (EDI), and their work to measure blockchain decentralization in both the consensus and software layers.

In decentralized AI, Botao "Amber" Hu, Helena Rong, and Janna Tay argue for a shift from traditional regulatory approaches to protocol-based governance, emphasizing the integration of technological safeguards, decentralized consensus mechanisms, and the adoption of a dynamic, emergent framework to foster human-machine coexistence.

Miles Jennings looks at the bigger picture to remind us that, while “Decentralization” sounds like an ideology that only some kinds of people care about, it actually impacts every one of us every day, whether it’s about who controls social media networks that influence our public discourse; who financial institutions choose to bank; or who controls AI tools.

And Jessica Furr and Joshua Durham examine how tools like regulatory sandboxes, no action letters, and safe harbors can effectively regulate innovative industries such as blockchain and AI, balancing growth and consumer protection.

The Full Rundown

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

• Vitalik Buterin has set out the roadmap for Ethereum for 2025 as an ecosystem that is a working, live demonstration of a new, more open and decentralized way of building things together.

• A look back at Federico Ast and Bruno Deffain’s paper that reviews the main theoretical principles underlying the nascent field of decentralized justice and the early empirical experience in real life use cases.

• Victoria Ivanova and Matt Prewitt argue that the EU has an opportunity to distinguish itself as the leading global supplier of one of AI’s critical factors of production: high quality, up-to-date, privacy-preserving datasets.

• The International AI Safety Report, backed by 30 countries, the OECD, UN, and EU, outlines the state of the science of AI capabilities and risks, and how to mitigate those risks.

• On memecoins and governance, Danielle Allen writes: “For years we’ve watched the problem of money in politics get worse and worse, but the Trump coin takes the matter to another level. It provides the technical means for enabling the vision of total capture of governance institutions by tech communities.”
  

• Nathan Schneider talks about decentralizing control of social media: “This should, above all, be a reminder that we have entrusted a few companies that are way too powerful with the stewardship of our public discourse. And this is not an acceptable arrangement.”

• Christina Ovezik, Dimitris Karakostas, and Aggelos Kiayias offer a systematization of the current landscape with respect to decentralization and derive a methodology that can help direct future research towards defining and measuring decentralization.
  

• At a time of great change for the crypto industry, we take a look back at Sarah Brennan, Gabriel Shapiro, and Marc Goldich’s paper on reframing how we look at a crypto legislative solution.

• In How to DAO, Kevin Owocki and Puncar explore the principles of decentralized finance, and teach the brass tacks of setting up and managing a DAO, from smart contracts to governance and innovation. Available for pre-order.

We were delighted to host this episode on the past, present and future of blockchain governance, with Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan

The authors of “Blockchain Governance” joined the Techquitable podcast to discuss how governance over blockchain communities emerges, the importance of decentralization in blockchain communities, and the tension between how regulation should work, and how it actually does.

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