🔬 DRC: March Report

DRC Grant Recipients, EY Global Blockchain Summit, Platform Power and Centralized Government Platforms, and more.

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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

DRC is proud to announce the first recipients for its inaugural grants round. We were thrilled with the number and high quality of applications and would like to thank everyone who took the time to share their work with us. We ourselves rely on funding and know how vital grants can be. We hope to be able to continue our support of thinkers and builders in our field and invite all who did not receive a grant this time to apply in future rounds.

The recipients for the first DRC Grant are:

  • Kelsie Nabben, zeroShadow, and Isaac Patka for their work on the legally ambiguous “grey zone” of protocol freezes during security crises.

  • Anita Srinivasan and Daniel Chu for their legal analysis across the US, EU, and India demonstrating that existing law already functionally mandates verifiable, decentralized identity for AI agents.

  • Helena Rong and Felix Beer for their work on protocol design as institutional design, introducing appropriate and sophisticated alternatives that preserve decentralization design principles as an alternative to blunt regulatory approaches.

We look forward to working with you over the coming months!

Next week, March 25th, we’ll be hosting day two of the EY Global Blockchain Summit, focusing on the world of regulated stablecoins and digital assets, offering legislative updates and discussions on everything from L2 regulation to global regulatory adoption and strategy, as well as clarity on compliance and policy trends. We look forward to seeing you there.

In policy news, DRC has spent March ramping up its engagement with Congress as digital asset legislation moves closer to a floor vote. We met with offices across both parties, including members of key Senate and House committees, to advance proposals that strengthen financial crime prevention without placing burdensome regulations on decentralized technology and open infrastructure. We also continued coordinating with allied organizations to protect developers and decentralized finance from overly broad regulation, and began engaging with broader financial privacy debates that could have significant implications for privacy-preserving technologies down the road.

We also joined the Linux Foundation and Agentic AI Foundation this month, engaging in working groups and preparing to kick off new research and policy analysis on decentralized AI. More details to come.

The Deep Dive

In “Platform Power and the Dangers of Centralized Government Platforms,” John Beezer makes the argument that governments are gaining, and could potentially abuse, platform power normally associated with tech giants. Here is an excerpt from this month’s DRC blog post:

Economists use the term “market power” to describe how monopolies gain the ability to unilaterally influence or control the terms of trade within a market, particularly the ability to set prices. Over the last three decades, evidence has accumulated that “platform power” should be recognized as a new and particularly potent form of market power.

In fact, platform power might be the ultimate expression of market power – greater even than the historical monopolies of the Gilded Age. In recent years, five of the first public companies to pass the trillion-dollar mark have been powered by it. Throughout the Internet era, platform power has driven escalating social change and brought extensive cultural and political disruption in the process.


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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!