The BlockchainGov Newsletter #32 | April 2026
April was all about decentralized security, how to craft it and the lived experience of lack thereof. Read this months newsletter here:
April was a big month! The release of a landmark book on decentralised security coincided with one of DeFi’s most challenging months for protocol security. April also featured sessions on cooperative data centres in Berlin and Canada, as well as new scholarship, updates from Network Nations Alliance, and a grant award.
I. Kelsie Nabben’s Decentralised Digital Security: Code, Crisis, Community
The biggest BlockchainGov-adjacent publication of the month: Kelsie Nabben‘s Decentralised Digital Security: Code, Crisis, Community was published by Manchester University Press in April 2026 (hardcover out now, Open Access e-book out later this week). This is a landmark book on how security happens within decentralised blockchain communities from a sociological perspective.
The book draws on years of ethnographic research conducted as major incidents unfolded — often in real time — following the engineers and community responders who collectively rescue, pause, repair, and prepare for the next crisis. A central case is the not-for-profit Security Alliance (SEAL), whose work sits at the intersection of hacker ethics, non-state governance, and the future of cybersecurity.
The book was supported by the Ethereum Foundation‘s ETH Rangers program. A nice demonstration between BlockchainGov’s research world and Ethereum’s security practice, and a signal of growing industry-academic support for studying security as governance.
On April 29, Kelsie presented the book at the Metagov Seminar. The seminar explored how the book provokes questions about non-state governance, hacker ethics, and what cybersecurity looks like when there is no central authority to call.
🔗 Read / download the book (free online) → https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526187093/
🔗 Kelsie’s “8 Critical Insights” blog post →
🔗Metagov Seminar recording (to be released) → https://luma.com/axkn6hgs
Big congratulations Kelsie!
II. April’s Security Crisis & Forthcoming Research
Nabbens book was extraordinarily timely as April 2026 was a brutal month for DeFi security, with more than $635 million reportedly lost across 28 incidents, including KelpDAO and Drift. These incidents showed how failures disrupts across protocols, markets, and governance systems, and how, in crisis, decentralised infrastructures still rely on emergency powers, ad hoc coordination, and unresolved questions of responsibility.
Apart from reading Kelsie’s book, we want to highlight a useful framing from Federico Ast’s forthcoming research. He writes that for DeFi to function as real financial infrastructure, it needs credible institutions for dispute resolution, accountability, and adjudication. In systems where transactions happen in real time, across borders, and beyond any single regulator, decentralised justice is becoming a missing institutional layer. Ast draws a parallel to the medieval lex mercatoria: merchant-made commercial law that emerged before modern state frameworks. His forthcoming chapter develops this topic further.
III. Tara Merk on Cooperative Digital Infrastructure & Data Centers
Tara Merk hosted and contributed to several events this month on cooperative and community-owned digital infrastructure. Some highlights:
On April 13, Dr. Merk presented on community data centers and democratisation at “Reclaim the Cloud! Contesting, Resisting and Reimagining Data Centers” in Berlin — a joint event by Bits & Bäume and the Weizenbaum Institute‘s research group on Digitalization, Sustainability, and Participation. The event brought together political analysis, activist experience, and alternative infrastructure research, with contributions from Paris Marx, Anne Pasek, Algorithm Watch, and French data center resistance group La Nuage était sous nos pieds. The discussion focused on the environmental, political, and ownership challenges posed by hyper-scaler data centers, and what community-led alternatives could look like.
On April 24, Tara and Kenzo Soares presented on Cooperative Digital Infrastructure & Data Centers as part of the Making Sense of AI series, convened by PCC Global, PCC Thailand, and the International Centre for Cooperative Management at Saint Mary’s University, with Phakin Nimmannorrawong as discussant. Tara is also teaching at Saint Mary’s and contributed a guest lecture on cooperative data centres.
🔗 Reclaim the Cloud → https://www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/events/detail/reclaim-the-cloud-contesting-resisting-and-reimagining-data-centers/
🔗 Making Sense of AI → https://platform.coop/blog/making-sense-of-ai-april24/
IV. Sofía Cossar Awarded JUST Open Source Stiftung Grant
We’re proud to share that Sofía Cossar has been awarded a grant from the JUST Open Source Stiftung as part of Cohort 2 — and the first research output is coming very very soon.
Sofía is a core contributor and interdisciplinary researcher at BlockchainGov and a PhD candidate at Université Paris II–CERSA. Her work focuses on the societal and political implications of emerging technologies — blockchain legitimacy, on-chain identification, and the role of digital infrastructure in shaping trust, governance, and institutional design. She also works with civil society organisations, governments, and decentralised communities across Latin America, the MENA region, and Europe on technology policy, governance, and civic infrastructure.
This is a well-deserved recognition! Congratulations, Sofía.
🔗 Discover the JUST Grants → https://lnkd.in/gtfZk-2s
🔗 Connect with Sofía → https://lnkd.in/gtydg_pv
V. Florence G Sell: Balancing Code and Law + Stanford Blockchain Governance Summit
Florence G Sell published Balancing Code and Law: Governance and Policy Challenges of Blockchain — a companion report to her October 2024 Regulating under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI. Together, the two reports map the governance landscape of two of the most transformative technologies of our time.
She writes extensively about how even the most alegal technology struggles to remain permanently outside the law - and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Well-designed legal frameworks need not impose unnecessary constraints; they can provide clarity and protection for all actors involved. This resonates directly with BlockchainGov’s long-standing argument that regulation and decentralised governance are not opposites - the challenge is designing legal frameworks that account for the specific institutional logics of blockchain systems, rather than flattening them into existing categories. Read more about this in our papers on regulatory equivalence.
Florence presented the key findings at the Stanford Blockchain Governance Summit at Stanford Law School.
VI. Network Nations Alliance Updates
The Network Nations Alliance — the collaborative infrastructure growing out of BlockchainGov’s Network Nations research programme — has a string of updates this month. The website is live at networknations.network, membership applications are now open for individuals and organisations (with approvals handled by any three existing stewards), and a new knowledge garden is up for browsing and contributions.
The next Monthly Call is Wednesday, May 6 — featuring Polis Labs, who will present on Applied Human Governance.
🔗 Join the Monthly Call → https://luma.com/tt22k8zi
🔗 Network Nations website → https://networknations.network
🔗 Apply for membership → https://networknations.network/apply/
🔗 Knowledge Garden → https://garden.networknations.network
VII. Coming up
Jamilya Kamalova (BlockchainGov / Sky-MakerDAO ecosystem, PhD candidate at Paris Panthéon-Assas University) and Eugene Leventhal (Research Director at Metagov, Head of Governance & Operations at Octant) will host a workshop at the European DAO Workshop (DAWo26) this July in Winterthur, Switzerland. Session details and registration coming soon.
In the meantime, their podcast Governance Futures is well worth a listen - Jamilya and Eugene talk with builders, researchers, and practitioners about how governance actually works (and fails) in Web3 and beyond.
DAWO26 Official Site & Program (6–7 July 2026, Winterthur):
https://dawo26.org/
Governance Futures Podcast (full episodes on Apple, Spotify, YouTube & Podbean):
That’s all from us this month, thank you for reading this month’s newsletter and see you in May!
👀 The BlockchainGov team