The Centre for Redecentralisation (CRDC) pursues research projects for creating new technological primitives that expand the types of computational systems that can be built and explores the economic, social, legal and political implications of these new types of systems. Our intent is to push the frontier of decentralised systems and technologies, providing developers in both research and industry with powerful building materials for creating tools that provide people and their communities with the power to solve their own problems, and create systems that protect the needs of everyone in a digital world.

Redecentralisation is not just about bypassing existing gatekeepers, but solving the difficult problem of providing a foundation for rich interaction in the digital domain without extractive intermediaries.

History

The CRDC started as a seed in March of 2019 from a series of meetings and conversations between the four founders of the CRDC (Jon Crowcroft, Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Dann Toliver and Hazem Danny Nakib) to create a new research centre as a home for a series of research initiatives into the redecentralisation of systems, computational and otherwise.

Projects

The focus on redecentralisation has lead to a number of research projects including:

A re-examination of the problem of fair exchange and a new fair exchange protocol called FEWD. Attestables, a minimal interface for trust across computational boundaries, were introduced as part of the FEWD project. A book version of this work is scheduled to be published by World Scientific in early 2023.

The CAMB project is funded by a UKRI grant and will run from spring 2022 to late 2024. This work extends the development of attestables, building on the fair exchange work in FEWD. Constructing attestables in new settings yields more opportunities for redecentralisation by building Cloud Attestables on Morello Boards (CAMB).

CoGMa, an annual conference and workshop bringing together really interesting people from industry, academia, and all walks of life to explore the problem of majoritarianism in systems and their social, economic, legal and political implications. First held in 2021, with all proceeds being published in the University of Cambridge Data and Policy journal.

The Cambridge Decentralisation Prize, a biannual prize for affiliates of the University of Cambridge conducting research or commercial opportunities leveraging decentralised technologies and supporting new cutting edge research and commercial spin-outs in the area of redecentralisation.

People

Publications

• Fair Exchange: Theory and Practice of Digital Belongings is a 292 page book (World Scientist, Mar 2024) by Carlos, Dann, Hazem and Jon that explains Fair Exchange as a fundamental distributed systems problem and its practical importance is several fields of the digital economy. The authors show how the use of trusted execution environments (called attestables in the book) can help to engineer decentralised solutions that obviate the need of monolithic trusted third parties. They also discuss the potencial legal isues that can emerge in practice from the execution of the five basic operations (handshake, deposit, verify, synchronise and release/restore) included in all fair exchange protocols.


• Centralization, Decentralization, and Digital Public Infrastructures. In this blog, Jon Crowcroft presents a general (nearly free from computer technicalities) introduction to the topic of centralisation vs decentralisation. Among other points, he mentions that the role of a central authority (for example, the goverment) in a complex system is to coordinate. He suggests that with the development of digital technologies, coordination need to be more efficient and not necessarily centralised.


• Towards International Governance of AI? This article by Jon Crowcroft and Hazem Danny Nakib is an invitation to ask the right questions about the controversy that Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance has recently generated. The authors ask, what exactly are governmental and non-governmental authorities concerned about in their discussions about the need to govern and regulate AI. They also ask, how is governance of AI different from governance of other technologies like nuclear weapons and air traffic. They suggest that the debate about AI should move away from the orthodoxy of owning and controlling to what it means to govern intelligence itself through radical new starting points.


• How to Tell When a Digital Technology Is Not Ready for You Jon Crowcroft 2020. To newcomers, it is hard to tell the difference between hype and ready to deliver and between re-branded and genuinily new. Jon has been working on Internet technologies since the inception of the Internet and has seen some technologies (good and bad) stay and others fade. In this 2 page article, Jon shares his wisdom over this question. He uses Blockchains, Machine Learning and Internet of Things as examples to explain his point. Don't be taken in, ask the right Qs. For example, am I getting the IoT devices + 10 years of software updates?


• Redhouse Gases: A manifesto for re-decentralisation is a seminal paper by Jon Crowcroft, Garreth Tyson and Richard Mortier that raises a concern about the strong tendency of the current Internet toward excessive centralisation. They describe how a handful of companies are increasingly accumulating data that leads to concentration of wealth and power.