Washington

The Washington D.C. DARTE session took place on October 29th, 2025, at The Homer Building, in collaboration with the European Commission, Project Catalyst, Government Blockchain Association, and Tezos. This session marked DARTE’s first edition in the United States and opened new transatlantic dialogues on decentralized infrastructure, jurisdictional recognition, and blockchain-based governance.

The session included three core conversations: Joanna Rindell and Alex Liu (Tezos) offered a comparative analysis of the EU and US approaches to “fully decentralized” systems under MiCAR and the CLARITY Act, exploring how principle-based versus rule-based models affect regulatory clarity; Joshua Klayman (Linklaters) outlined the challenges of regulatory fragmentation in the US and abroad, calling for a recognition-based system to replace impractical harmonization efforts; and Mat Yarger (Demia) delivered a keynote on building trustworthy digital asset ecosystems through data integrity, interoperability, and bottom-up infrastructure design.

The Washington edition deepened DARTE’s mission of bridging global policy silos by connecting institutional, legal, and technological leaders from both sides of the Atlantic in pursuit of aligned, forward-looking digital asset regulation.

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Regulatory Treatment of Decentralization

The session led jointly by Joanna Rindell and Alex Liu compared the EU’s principle-based MiCAR approach to the rule-based CLARITY Act in the US. Both regimes aim to exclude “fully decentralized” projects from certain regulations, but their definitions differ significantly. In the EU, decentralization must eliminate any intermediary role across all layers; in the US, “mature blockchains” are judged by quantitative thresholds (e.g., <20% governance control). Participants debated the risks of definitional ambiguity and the benefits of a balanced, multi-dimensional scoring framework.

Call to Actions

Develop a common decentralization assessment toolkit that blends quantitative thresholds with qualitative oversight, suitable for both EU and US contexts.
Encourage ESMA and US regulators to co-launch a joint guidance note or academic collaboration to converge on functional decentralization benchmarks.

Cross-Border Regulatory Recognition

Presented by Joshua Klayman, this session explored how fragmentation across jurisdictions—especially between the US and EU—creates barriers for digital asset compliance, innovation, and market access. Rather than pursuing full harmonization, which is often politically and culturally infeasible, participants advocated for regulatory “recognition” mechanisms. These would allow jurisdictions to acknowledge each other’s frameworks, provided they meet baseline standards of governance, transparency, and risk controls.

Call to Actions

Promote bilateral or multilateral recognition agreements among key jurisdictions (e.g., EU-US, UK-Singapore) based on agreed digital asset governance principles.
Create a regulatory principles index to serve as a benchmark for cross-border recognition without imposing one-size-fits-all rules.