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

This month, the DRC has released its first document to urge for a more decentralized approach to AI, after the Digital Currency Group (DCG) released a Harris Poll of over 2,000 Americans that reveals strong public support for decentralized approaches to AI. With centralized data storage, governance, and usage, opaque scraping and crawling practices, and the uneven distribution of benefits, the time to bring decentralized blockchain solutions to AI is now: “Historically, major technological innovations have tended to concentrate economic power and influence within a limited set of stakeholders. This historical concentration — and the negative externalities it produced, from wealth inequality to minimal public oversight — should serve as a clear warning.”

Amal Ibraymi and Andre Omietanski argue that zero-knowledge proofs can provide strong age verification with minimal data exposure, significantly reducing the risks of identity theft, data breaches, and privacy violations inherent in current systems. As we continue to look at how decentralized digital IDs can help change how people know and trust one another online, ZKPs can offer a win for users, service providers, and lawmakers looking for a new solution to the age verification dilemma.

For those attending the Science of Blockchain Conference, DAO Berkeley (officially the SBC DAO Workshop) will return this August 3 at UC Berkeley for roundtable on decentralized governance, cryptoeconomics, and token systems. Registration has been extended to June 15.

The Full Rundown

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

• The Handbook on Institutions and Complexity introduces complexity theory for understanding institutions, covering emergence, networks, ergodicity, and modularity, and exploring their contributions to institutional formulation and evolution.

• Primavera de Filippi and Morshed Mannan introduce the concept of regulatory equivalence — the use of technological guarantees that can serve the same purpose as traditional legal formalities.

• Francisco Mendonca, Giovanna DiMarzo, and Nabil Abdennadher present data cooperatives as a model for fair data governance, enabling individuals to collectively control, manage, and benefit from their information while adhering to cooperative principles such as democratic member control, economic participation, and community concern.

• A global report on the legal status of DAO governance at a moment where we are transitioning into the next legal challenge: the integration of AI agency into on-chain governance. Featuring fellows Anja von Rosenstiel and Joshua Tan.

• Andreas Fauler explains how decentralized data trusts could combat the limitations of centralized data trusts, allowing for greater trust and scale for this version of a trusted data intermediary.

• Justin Wales presents the update of his Crypto Legal Handbook, a guide to the legal landscape of crypto, Web3, and the decentralized world.

• Nathan Schneider speaks to the convergence of technological and political power: “Divine kingship and the sysadmin of a social network may seem like quite different forms of power, but both their mythologies and realities converge. “God mode” is a byword for sysadmin powers over a computer system; both a god and a sysadmin claim omniscience and omnipotence in their domain.”

Jonathan Galea, counsel at Cahill, Gordon, & Reindel LLP, joins Connor Spelliscy to break down the evolving definition of decentralization under MiCA and the broader EU regulatory framework. They explore what “sufficient decentralization” means in Europe, how regulators like ESMA and national authorities like Denmark’s FSA are approaching DeFi, and what U.S. policymakers can learn from the EU's years-long legislative process.

Connor Spelliscy discusses the Market Structure bill at Consensus, and talks about the difficulties in education around blockchain.

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