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 led to a number of research projects and activities including:

• Global Thematic Research Network (UNIJUI's node)
  Budget: 2 million Reais (about 295 000 GBP).
  Length: Jul 2026--Jul 2031
  This is a grant awarded to Rafael and Fabricia by CAPES (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education) to strengthen and expand their international collaborations.
  
  The CRDC contributed to the grant proposal and is now in the list of their international collaborators along other 8 research institutions, including the Alan Turing Institute, University of Seville (Spain), Instituto Politécnico de Leiria (Portugal), Universidad Distrital Franscisco José de Caldas (Colombia), University of Pittsburgh (USA) and Renault DI-RA Research Department (France).
  This grant will give us the opportunity to continue our on-going work on decentralisation, smart sustainable cities, security and other topics that we have in our agenda like the use smart city data for building sustainable AI. We practice responsible research!.


• Development of Decentralized Integration Solutions to Enable Interoperation of Digital Services in Smart and Sustainable Cities
  Budget: 274 500 Reais (about 40 500 GBP).
  Length: Dec 2023--Dec 2026
  This is a grant awarded to Rafael by the Brazilian CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) to conduct research on the use of innovative decentralised technologies in the development of smart sustainable cities. The project has strong links with the Prefeitura of Santa Rosa (Municipal Council). It uses the city of Santa Rosa as a test--bed and the prefeitura as a source of direct information about actual technical, social, economic and political problems that afflict smart city development.
  Carlos is involved as an international collaborator.
  Tim has contributed the TrustChain decentralised ID system and guidance to deploy and test it.
  TODAQ (Dann and Hazem) have contributed infrastructure towards the prototyping of the FEWD protocol.


• The FEWD (Fair Exchange Without Disputes)project
  Length: Jun 2019--
  re-examined the problem of fair exchange and the limitations of fair exchange protocols used in current online business.
  It produced the design of a new fair exchange protocol called FEWD (Fair Exchange Without Disputes). FEWD gurantees strong fairness (no disputes upon completion), strict privacy (no leakage of sensitive information to trusted third parties) and timeliness mechanisms for immediate and unilateral cancellation. All without the inclusion of physical clocks.
  In addition, it defined the attestable model: a minimal interface for trust across computational boundaries.
  The implementation of FEWD is in progress in collaboration with Fabricia and other colleagues from Unijui University. We have made some progress, eg, formally validated (model-checked) the synchronisation module and implemented the main functions. See Git repo with work in progress.


• The CAMB (Cloud Attestables on Morello Boards) project.
  Budget: 525 800 GBP).
  Length: Apr 2022--Dec 2024
  was awarded to Jon and Carlos by a UKRI and run from spring 2022 to Dec 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).
• The Smart contracts and blockchain in the creation of monitoring mechanisms of integration solutions to guarantee agreements between parties and detect possible breaches of contracts project
  Budget: 25 000 Reais (about 3 700 GBP).
  Length: Nov 2019--Nov 2022
  was awarded to Fabricia by FAPERG (Rio Grande do Sul State Research Support Foundation) to examine the potential of blockchains, smart contracts and Decentralised Ledgers (DLs) in general, in applications that consume and integrate data from different and mutually distrustful sources.
  Carlos participated as an international collaborator.
• The CoGMa workshop
  Is an annual conference and workshop bringing together people from industry, academia, and all walks of life to explore the concept of majoritarianism. We take advantage of our multidisciplinary team to examine majoritarianism from different dimensions, including its technical, economic, social, legal and political implications.
  First held in 2021, with all proceeds being published in the University of Cambridge Data and Policy journal.
  We capitalise on Hazem's (a lawyer) in-depth understanding of law and technology to shed light on legal and political issues.
  
• The Cambridge Decentralisation Prize
  Is 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.


• Decentralised architectures in smart cities: A comprehensive survey of technologies, opportunities, and challenges, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, V. 122, May 2026
  In this article, Rafael, Fabricia, Carlos, Jon and other collaborators explain the advantages, disadvantages and challenges that the use of decentralised technologies in smart and sustainable development, presents. The article also includes a literature review of latest progress in this direction--- some cities like Berlin, London and Seul have considered decentralised services in their smart development.
  The article emerged from on going work with the Municipality of Santa Rosa, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil which is being developed as a smart and sustainable region. The plans include the city of Santa Rosa (seat of the municipality) and its agricultural area of roughly 200 KM² farmed to grow soybeans.
  


• Unlocking the Potential of Decentralised IDs For Smart Cities
  is a 6-page article by Carlos, Jon et al that discusses the procedure and technical issues faced in a local deployment of Trustchain--- a decentralised ID system being implemented by Tim Hobson's team from the Alan Turing Institute. >
  The paper was presented in the III Colloquium on Blockchain and Decentralised Web (CSBC 2025), Maceió/AL, Brazil. It invites developers from academy, industry and goverment to consider the potential of decentralised IDs systems like Trustchain before blindly adopting centralised ID systems offered by the dominant cloud monopolies. The paper explains how Trustchain can be used in the implementation of smart city services.
  We are testing Trustchain's potential in Santa Rosa ---a city located in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, being developed as smart and sustainable to motivate innovation.


• Building a Smart City that Stimulates Innovation Using Open Source and Decentralised Technologies
  is a 4-page article by Carlos, Jon et al., presented at XXVIII Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering (CiBSE 2025). It shows some of the results that the city of Santa Rosa, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil has achieved so far in its development as a smart and sustainable city.
  It mentions their vision in the use of decentralised technologies to stimulate innovation with EDI as a priority and to retain control of their data to be able to publish some as free open data and to share other under data contract agreements.


• Majoritarianism and Monoculture (M&M) Data & Policy Journal, Vol. 7, Num. e10, Jan 2025
  is an 8-page article where Mansoor, Dann and Hazem raise concerns about the potential danger of the majoritarism approach used in consensus algorithms to determine who is right and wrong. Current algorithms assume that those that fall in the majority are right and taken on board and those that fall in the minority are wrong and ignored or even worse, regarded as adversaries. We argue that in software systems minorities can also contribute if they were given rights and protection like in law and politics.
  We explain how the danger of the majoritism approach that underpins the consensus algorithms widely used in blockchains can be mitigated: we suggest the relaxation of three of their core design principles, namely, simplicy, preservation and progress.


• Centralization, Decentralization, and Digital Public Infrastructures (Jan 2024).
  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? (Feb 2024)
  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 (alternatively click here)
  Jon wrote this blog in 2020 to help newcomers to tell appart real innovations from recycling. 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?


• On the use of smart hybrid contracts to provide flexibility in algorithmic governance, Data & Policy Journal, Vol. 6, Num. e8, Feb 2024.
  This article is also available from arxiv. It discusses how smart contracts can be used in Computational Law.
  Section 5 (pg 7) suggests the implementation of preventive laws. The authors, Carlos Molina-Jimenez and Felizia, argue that with recent progress in computer technology (eg IoT and AI) it is time to progress from traditional punitive laws (reactive investigation) towards preventive laws. In a preventive judiciary system, technology is used to prevent the occurence of crimes, rather than to find and punish the perpretators to compensate the victims like in the current systems. They observe that the consequences of many crimes can hardly be compensated or healed. To address the problem, the authors suggest a disruptive change in the judiciary system. Technology seems to be ready, the challenge is to use it without compromising human rights, eg, the right to privacy.


• A Case for a Currencyless Economy Based on Bartering with Smart Contracts (Oct 2020)
  In this paper, Carlos, Hazem Jon and other collaborators, highlight the advantages of the bartering system which was widely used in the past, before money became the main trading mechanism. We observe that current technologies (eg, mobile phones, online platforms for matching trading partners, smart contracts and delivery services) can help to overcome the difficulties that relegated bartering to obsolescence.
  We believe that bartering deserves a re--consideration to operate along digital money and other trading meachnisms. The power of its peer-to-peer, item-for-item decentralised model should not be overlooked.


• Redhouse Gases: A manifesto for re-decentralisation (Dec 2020)
  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.