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

June was a full month of engagement on both sides of the Capitol and across the regulatory landscape.

DRC participated in the Blockchain Association's National Security and Law Enforcement Fly-In, meeting with congressional staff alongside colleagues from Kroll and Ribbit Capital, including former Treasury and FBI officials. Conversations centered on the national security and law enforcement provisions of the CLARITY Act and on DRC's proposed Digital Asset Cyber Innovation Center, which would formalize public-private coordination on cybersecurity, illicit finance, and emerging digital asset threats.

We also attended the ETH Conference, engaging with founders, developers, investors, and industry leaders on the state of blockchain technology. A recurring theme was legislative urgency: without clear market structure rules through the CLARITY Act, meaningful innovation will continue to migrate offshore or slow under regulatory ambiguity.

Over in Europe, we attended the Global Solutions Summit, meeting with our European partners to discuss digital transformation and AI governance, and engage in discussions on topics from global economic cooperation to human flourishing in the age of AI.

Back in the U.S., DRC held meetings with regulatory officials focused on our core policy priorities: the consumer protection and security benefits of decentralization, and the importance of resilient cybersecurity standards for decentralized infrastructure. These conversations were part of ongoing efforts to build a shared analytical vocabulary between DRC and the agencies that will ultimately shape the regulatory environment.

On the infrastructure side, we convened the first session of DRC's Layer 2 Working Group, bringing together leading blockchain infrastructure projects and outside counsel to begin developing regulatory frameworks that account for the technological diversity of blockchain networks. The goal is to ensure that future rules do not inadvertently treat all blockchain architectures as equivalent, a mistake that would harm the projects most committed to genuine decentralization.

Congressional engagement on the CLARITY Act continued at pace, spanning both Democratic and Republican offices. DRC spent significant time briefing staff on the bill's consumer protection, market integrity, and counter-illicit finance provisions, while providing technical and legislative feedback to offices working through potential amendments. In parallel, we joined coalition efforts in support of the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, which protects developers and miners who do not custody user funds from being misclassified as financial intermediaries.

The Full Rundown

Further reading from the space:

• The Project Liberty Institute and the Global Solutions Initiative release Building Digital Infrastructure Ready for the AI Era, synthesizing a year of interviews with officials across 13 middle-power governments: “Digital infrastructure has quietly become the primary lever through which governments shape outcomes in the AI era. How a country designs its national digital stack — its identity systems, data exchanges, connectivity layers, interoperability standards — is increasingly a fundamental act of governance, not a technical procurement decision.”

• Hypha Co-op releases The Canadian Solidarity Stack, a feasibility study co-produced with CanTrust Hosting Co-operative on whether Canadian co-operatives can build and govern their own AI infrastructure.

• Igor Calzada and Itziar Eizaguirre examine the social impact of AI in the Basque Country. They argue that, as AI rapidly becomes embedded in our daily lives, the key challenge is no longer whether it will transform society—but rather how public governance can ensure that this transformation serves citizens and strengthens democratic institutions.

• Vitalik Buterin runs a public stylometry experiment, revealing he authored an Ethereum document anonymously and inviting anyone to unmask it with AI text analysis. A pointed test of whether pseudonymous participation can survive once authorship attribution becomes cheap, with obvious stakes for anyone who treats anonymity as a privacy primitive rather than a convenience.

• RadicalxChange publishes their report “The Plural Stack: Rebuilding Our Foundations from Protocol Up”, envisioning a European digital stack: “The aim is to build open and decentralised technologies, fair and non-extractive economic models, and plural, participatory communities - for every layer of the stack.”

• Glen Weyl argues in a guest essay that Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical Magnifica Humanitas opens a door between technology and religion, and that AI firms partnering with religious traditions is not short-term political convenience but a way to steer and legitimise the technology itself.

• The Data Transfer Initiative publishes its regular regulatory roundup, a global tour of data portability law in motion: the UK CMA's new conduct requirements on Google's portability API, Canada's codified Open Banking framework, and Brazil's fast-tracked Digital Markets Bill.

• Audrey Tang presents the 6-Pack of Care at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, six community-level tests for Civic AI (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, solidarity, symbiosis) deployed through bounded local stewards rather than universal governors. The most developed alternative going to either alignment-by-labs or regulation-by-governments, drawn from Taiwan's alignment assemblies and the ROOST safety network.

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!