April 13, 2026

Earlier this year, we announced the DRC Grants Program. The idea was to support research that connects technology, governance, and policy in the service of decentralization, and to support the community doing that work beyond our own team. We wrote a bit about who we are and what we were looking for in the introductory blog post. This post is to introduce the three projects we selected. 

The projects span AI agent identity, blockchain security governance, and the broader emergence of what one team calls “protocolized institutions.” They come from different disciplinary backgrounds and address different domains, but they all share qualities we value. Each one identifies a concrete governance problem, grounds it in the current situation, and makes the case that decentralized approaches offer something that centralized alternatives cannot. Below are short descriptions of each project in the grantees’ own words.

No Gate, No Claim: How Existing Law Demands Decentralized Identity for AI Agents  

Anita Srinivasan and Daniel Chu

AI agents are traversing the open web, scraping content, executing transactions, and interacting with services, increasingly without any reliable mechanism for verifiable identity or accountability. This project undertakes a comparative legal analysis across three major jurisdictions to show that existing law already demands decentralized identity for AI agents. In the United States, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act requires a technological access barrier, not a mere contractual prohibition, to establish liability. In the European Union, the AI Act’s transparency obligations take effect in August 2026 with no prescribed infrastructure for agent-level compliance. In India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act requires technical safeguards that presuppose a verifiable link between agent and operator. Across all three regimes, the project argues that a closed identity system controlled by a handful of AI providers would solve accountability while creating a new gatekeeper bottleneck. Decentralized identity avoids this: permissionless registration prevents gatekeeping, cryptographic verifiability works across jurisdictions without a single controlling entity, and multi-stakeholder governance provides legitimacy. The paper maps the emerging decentralized agent identity stack and makes specific, actionable policy recommendations for US, EU, and Indian lawmakers.

Public-Private Blockchain Security Coordination 

Dr Kelsie Nabben, zeroShadow, and Isaac Patka

Blockchain security ecosystems operate in a persistent state of insecurity shaped by continuous adversarial pressure, distributed authority, and cross-border risk. While often framed as a niche technical problem, blockchain security offers an early and unusually transparent view into the future of digital security more broadly. This project focuses on protocol freezes: security interventions that temporarily or permanently halt the movement of digital assets to contain an exploit, prevent further loss, or support recovery. A freeze is not simply a technical act but a governance decision, an extraordinary measure that mobilises collective authority across decentralised and centralised actors to respond to security crises. Yet freezes currently operate in a grey zone: technically feasible but normatively unclear, legally ambiguous, and unevenly coordinated across jurisdictions. Drawing on multi-year embedded research within decentralised security communities and deep industry experience in blockchain security, the project delivers an empirically grounded working paper alongside a policy memo developed in consultation with security practitioners, equipping policymakers with a realistic account of how freezes actually occur, who can enact them, and how public institutions can support consumer protection without undermining decentralised legitimacy.

Protocolized Institutions 

Helena Rong and Felix Hemsted

Across domains once defined by bureaucracies, courts, and central banks, a quieter institutional shift is underway: the rules that bind collective life are increasingly being written into protocols rather than promulgated through statutes or administered through agencies. This project introduces protocolized institutions, defined as arrangements in which binding rules are not only mediated but instantiated by technical architecture. We distinguish between (1) governance through protocol: existing institutions use protocols as instruments to deliver their mandates more efficiently; the institution governs and the protocol carries; (2) governance of protocol: protocols themselves become objects of governance, with human processes determining how they are upgraded, forked, or contested; and (3) governance by protocol: the protocol itself performs governance functions traditionally reserved for institutions, adjudicating, enforcing, allocating, or constituting membership through code that applies the same rule to every case. This project establishes a research and policy agenda for an institutional form that the convergence of digital public infrastructure, open protocols, and autonomous agents is making both ubiquitous and urgent.

We’re excited to see where these projects go. As the work progresses, we’ll be sharing updates here and through our newsletter, as well as introducing all of the projects in their entirety once they’re completed at the end of July. Looking forward to sharing more with you then. For now, thanks for reading and all the best wherever your own work is taking you.