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

Our proposal to establish a Digital Asset Cyber Innovation Center (DACIC) was included as Section 10904 of the updated CLARITY Act. We worked with Ribbit Capital, the Security Alliance (SEAL), and Chainalysis to build support for the provision and brief congressional offices on it. The DACIC would create a standing public-private coordination center spanning Treasury, Justice, Homeland Security, the FBI, the Secret Service, and Defense, alongside vetted private-sector partners, to address crypto-enabled illicit finance, cyber theft, sanctions evasion, and state-sponsored threats. It improves information sharing and operational coordination without imposing compliance obligations that public blockchain infrastructure cannot meet.

We joined the Blockchain Association and the Crypto Council for Innovation in advocating for Senate consideration of the CLARITY Act, meeting with Senate Banking Committee and national security staff on the bill's updated cybersecurity, law enforcement, and national security provisions. Our guidance focused on how those measures strengthen consumer protection and counter illicit finance without breaking the decentralized systems they touch.

The first round of DRC Grant financing has now come to a very successful close. We will be highlighting the work of the grantees over the next few months and look forward to sharing that work with you here, starting with the announcement that Anita Srinivasan presented her work with Daniel Chu, "Decentralized Identity for Agents," at this year's Science of Blockchain DAO Workshop. The question they take up, how an autonomous agent proves who it is and who stands behind it, runs through several items in this month's Rundown. It will certainly not be the last round so, if you’d like to be a participant going forward, stay tuned for more news. We anticipate announcing a new round in Q4 of this year.

Finally, a landmark report is now nearing completion. With over 30 interviews from experts in the field, three in-depth case studies, and a set of proactive policy recommendations, our report on alternatives to concentrated AI development is now in review. We very much look forward to sharing it with you in the fall.

The Full Rundown

Further reading from the space:

• DRC's Kyle Bligen explains the CLARITY Act's long-debated ethics provisions. A clear read on what the provisions would actually require, useful for anyone tracking the bill through Senate consideration.

• Vitalik Buterin maps AI capability growth across three historical waves and defines AGI as a system that could sustain civilization without humans, arguing for deceleration through human-machine integration rather than a race to autonomous capability.

• Chris Riley of the Data Transfer Initiative argues that trust in agentic AI attaches to the legal entity behind an agent, not the software. He catalogs the competing agent identity schemes now emerging and shows most solve addressing rather than identity. He says we need to “find (and identify) the agent, find the entity, then find the policies and practices.”

• Igor Calzada argues that regional innovation systems can anchor human-AI governance in healthcare, drawing on Living Lab fieldwork in the Basque Country. Cooperative traditions and health data cooperatives make trustworthy AI deployment possible without surrendering democratic legitimacy.

• Katie Thorn of Digital Care Hub, Caroline Green of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, and Daniel Casson launch the AI in Social Care Alliance at the second AI and Social Care Summit. The Alliance's first project is co-producing an AI constitution for social care that organizations can adopt and be held to.

• The Ethereum Foundation's policy team releases Ethereum for Governments and Institutions, arguing that current geopolitical shifts make neutral digital public infrastructure a requirement rather than a preference.

• Alek Tarkowski and Ilario Valdelli examine how AI extraction is restructuring the knowledge ecosystem and propose an approach for Wikimedia to avoid becoming a “dark commons”: “Without a coordinated and swift response, Wikimedia risks a scenario in which it remains widely used but is structurally invisible and lacks agency in a new knowledge loop: the emerging AI ecosystem.”

• Open Future describes the legal friction between EU open-source AI ambitions and EU copyright rules across eight European initiatives and proposes ways to resolve it.

• Paul Keller publishes a feasibility study for a European Books Data Commons, arguing libraries can build a multilingual, AI-ready public domain dataset under their own governance. A concrete alternative to letting training corpora form by scraping.

• Stanford's SBC DAO Workshop runs under the theme "Farewell, but not goodbye," arguing DAOs are in a winter of declining enthusiasm and tooling collapse even as flagship DAOs hold steady and more entities than ever organize assets on-chain.

• Bluesky expands its assistant Attie into a research tool querying the whole Atmosphere, across any AT Protocol app.

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!