Policy decisions made in the next two years could shape the future of the blockchain industry for decades to come. A key decision policymakers will have to make is how to define decentralization. Like many others, we recommend focusing on control, and @SH_Brennan and I are excited to share a report that provides a comprehensive and actionable set of recommendations for designing a control-based test for decentralization. ⬇️ We couldn’t have done it without the 40+ teams, developers, founders, operators, and policymakers whose feedback on v1 of this report was critical to us in understanding the perspective of a range of key stakeholders in the ecosystem. We want a future that offers users unprecedented levels of transparency, economic opportunity, and security on decentralized infrastructure; not one where opportunists launch centralized blockchain tokens to bypass securities laws and exploit retail investors. We’ve proposed seven decentralization principles that, if met, would justify lower regulatory burdens. We aimed for the principles to be objective, technology-neutral, and evergreen. See below for a summary of the decentralization principles and further down for a link to our paper with the full-text of our recommendations: (1) Open: Source code is publicly available and open source. (2) Autonomous: The network operates without intervention using pre-established rules encoded in the source code. (3) Permissionless: No person or group of persons under common control has unilateral authority to restrict use of the network. (4) Non-Custodial: Participants can maintain total independent control of their digital assets, governed solely by their private keys. (5) Distributed: No person or group has unilateral authority to alter the network or control a large percentage of network tokens. (6) Credibly Neutral: The source code does not empower specific persons with private permissions over others. (7) Economically Independent: Mechanisms that facilitate value accrual to network tokens are functional. We do not believe that all of these criteria need to be used in all cases when measuring decentralization as L1s, L2s, and app tokens may require different standards, and we have included carveouts where relevant. Please DM us with any feedback! In the coming weeks, we'll apply these principles in recommendations we send to policymakers on blockchain legislation and regulations.