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- 🔬 DRC: January Report
🔬 DRC: January Report
The DRC Grant, Decentralized Antitrust, Market Structure, and more.
Decentralization Research Center
January 21, 2026
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
We're thrilled to announce the launch of the first Decentralization Research Grant!
The Decentralization Research Center is offering three grants of $5,000 each to support research teams exploring the intersection of decentralized technology, governance, and policy.
What we're looking for: Research projects that address decentralized technology, decentralized governance, and provide actionable recommendations for policymakers.
Who can apply: Teams of 2+ people from anywhere in the world, across all backgrounds and disciplines.
Apply for the grant here. FAQs here.
This month, we continued sustained engagement with staff on the Senate Banking and Senate Agriculture Committees as they advance bipartisan digital asset market structure legislation. Our focus remains on ensuring that any framework meaningfully establishes consumer protections while preserving the decentralized, permissionless architecture that underpins secure and innovative blockchain systems.
In addition, we engaged directly with the U.S. Treasury Department and partnered with Ribbit Capital and the Security Alliance (SEAL) to support pragmatic legislative proposals aimed at combating illicit finance in DeFi. This work is designed to proactively identify and mitigate threats from malicious actors, particularly nation-state adversaries, without imposing burdensome or unworkable obligations on decentralized protocols or their developers.
This month also saw the release of "Leveraging Blockchain in a New Era of Antitrust," our comment out in the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy in collaboration with Flashbots.
The current pace and direction of technological innovation have challenged both antitrust law and enforcement. We argue that blockchain technology offers structural advantages in promoting competitive and fair markets and could help avoid the current dilemma of choosing between competition-stifling monopolies and damaging ex post enforcement. As examples, we provide two real-world cases that represent the type of cases where blockchain could be employed to further the goals of antitrust law while offering companies non-destructive means of settling regulatory action.
The Deep Dive
In “Confidential Computing as an Antitrust Remedy for Google’s Search Monopoly,” Reid Yager follows up on our comment to give the most recent updates to the Google lawsuits. Here is an excerpt from this month’s DRC blog post:
If Google’s ad auction logic was executed inside TEEs, regulators could rely on remote attestation, a cryptographic mechanism that proves a specific, audited version of the auction code is running unmodified. Instead of a costly and human-intermediated oversight regime, the remediation technical committee could review real-time attestations from Google Cloud TEEs to certify the rules of the ad auctions. Such a system could operate transparently and ensure user data is used appropriately without compromising confidentiality and that the rules of the auction are not being manipulated to improve the profits of the auctioneer
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!