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

Much of our policy work this month was along two threads.

On market structure, Kyle attended Consensus Miami for meetings with industry stakeholders, Congressional offices, and SEC staff on the evolving digital asset policy landscape and the market structure legislation moving through Congress. He joined the Law of Code podcast to argue that robust conflict-of-interest provisions for public officials are what will give the CLARITY Act durable bipartisan support. After meetings with Senate staff throughout the process, he was in the room for the Senate Banking Committee markup, where the bill advanced with bipartisan support, an important step for digital asset market structure reform.

Alongside the markup, we've continued pressing both Democratic and Republican offices to preserve the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) provisions within CLARITY. Without meaningful protections for non-custodial developers and DeFi infrastructure participants, the legislation risks undermining innovation and losing broad support across the decentralized technology ecosystem.

On privacy-enhancing technologies, Kyle moderated a panel at Miden's Privacy Salon during Consensus on the intersection of privacy, compliance, and decentralized technologies, featuring Lindsay Fraser (Chief Policy Officer, Blockchain Association) and Linda Jeng (Chief Legal and Policy Officer, Aave Labs). DRC also sponsored the Regulatory PETshop at Georgetown's Institute of International Economic Law, which convened policymakers, academics, and industry experts to examine the role of PETs in regulatory compliance and financial integrity.

Kelsie Nabben’s new book “Decentralised Digital Security: Code, Crisis, Community” is now out (Open Access). The book documents the ad hoc, quasi vigilante social layer of security that has emerged in parallel to the economic security we think about when we talk about cryptoeconomic protocols. Drawing on immersive digital ethnography, the book examines how decentralized technologies depend on not just technical systems but social infrastructures for incentive alignment and coordination. Through first-hand case studies, it reveals the white hat hackers, social infrastructures and ecosystem-wide efforts that make blockchain security possible.

The Full Rundown

The Full Rundown is back. Further reading from the space:

• The Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku Initiative releases its privacy SDK, letting wallets integrate Railgun, Tornado Cash, and Privacy Pools natively. A meaningful step toward wallet-level privacy as deployable default rather than research artifact.

• OpenZeppelin releases their “Blockchain Network Risk for Regulated Finance: A Technical Risk Assessment of Six Networks.” The first critical question regulators are asking is the one most institutions are least prepared for: how was the underlying network evaluated before client assets were placed on it?

• Sarah Nicole introduces her new AI substack “AI Organon,” a framework (in progress) to equip people to think clearly and debate serenely in an AI-mediated world.

• Caleb Shack and Alana Levin at Variant publish "Compute as a Commodity," identifying five preconditions for a GPU futures market and assessing where compute currently stands on each.

• Matt Martensen, whom we featured last year in our data co-op report, has announced the release of the cooperative browser Surge for mac.

• Vitalik Buterin posts a defense of the Ethereum Foundation's strategy, arguing for "longevity over breadth" and a narrowed focus on what he calls CROPS (censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, security).

• Anja von Rosenstiel has a new paper out in RDI 5/2026 comparing regulatory approaches to the financial data market in the United States and the European Union, with a particular focus on crypto assets.

• The Atlas Research Group has launched, building commons-owned tools for collective sensemaking. Their first post rejects the false binary between institutional surveillance and individual retreat, proposing "opt-in legibility" as a third path. Their first post is here.

• Ballandies, Spychiger, Serdült, and Tessone publish "DAO-enabled decentralized physical AI," proposing a democratic architecture (DePAI) for coordinating humans and autonomous machines. The paper folds DAOs, DePIN, and digital-democracy research into a single stack.

• PLI published their report, “AI, Agency, and Protocols: Power and Governance in Open Social Networks" by Mallory Knodel, Sarah Nicole, Ivan Sigal, Joshua Tan, and Jessica Theodule. From economic, governance, and technical perspectives it looks at how to preserve meaningful human agency as AI begins acting on our behalf within social infrastructures.

• Nathan Schneider responds to Pope Leo’s encyclical and places it in historical context.

• Anna Colom, Elena Murray, and Marta Poblet Balcell present “Media, Democracy and Generative AI: A Critical Juncture,” an in-depth analysis of how Generative AI is reshaping journalism, media, and, as result, democracy.

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!