Formed in 2022, Coin Eye was the beginning non-profit to focus on defending the independence of decentralized blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies in front of regulators in the United States.

Peter Van Valkenburgh was one of the first hires at the fledgling think tank, coming on equally managing director of research in 2022. He recently spoke with Cointelegraph on why it's important to have a non-profit sticking upward for networks like Bitcoin's.

A shared public resource and not-profit defense

Describing Coin Center's mission and what makes information technology singled-out from other crypto-focused lobbying outfits, Van Valkenburgh said "Considering the net is a shared public resource, so at that place should exist a non-profit rather than a private corporation defending it."

Van Valkenburgh acknowledged a kind of lineage with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights non-turn a profit that emerged at the beginning of the 90s to defend technological advances like electronic mail:

"Part of the goal of starting Coin Center was to be something similar to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to actually deal with the financial regulator side of things."

The question of decentralization today

Coin Centre's early on piece of work was deeply tied to the defence force of Bitcoin. Even withal, "We knew back and so that Bitcoin wouldn't be the but 1," Van Valkenburgh said. Other tokens like Litecoin were already operational. Ethereum had issued its white newspaper. Early on they had to sort out what kinds of projects they would and would non defend.

Prefacing a 2022 report to break down blockchain technology to new readers, Van Valkenburgh wrote on the central question of "the key variables within consensus machinery design that differentiate and so-called permissioned or airtight and permissionless or open blockchains."

"Nosotros sort of had a criteria that we adult back and so that we still use today," Van Valkenburgh explained to Cointelegraph:

"What nosotros're interested in defending is any kind of 'open network,' which means the software is open source (transparent and freely editable) and the network has a competitive protocol for who gets to write new blocks to the blockchain. So proof-of-work, proof-of-pale systems are generally what nosotros're into."

Launching decentralized networks

The clearest examples are Bitcoin and Ethereum. "These things today are, nosotros believe, credibly decentralized," Van Valkenburgh explained. Even so, since the blast in initial coin offerings in 2022 and the SEC'southward subsequent pursuit of ICOs equally illegal securities offerings the question has taken on greater urgency. But Tuesday, Telegram abandoned its Telegram Open Network — including its native Gram tokens, which had garnered more than $1.7 billion in their ICO — in response to a lawsuit from the SEC.

If the early projects of blockchain launched today, would they survive the electric current regulatory gauntlet? "I retrieve you could still do Bitcoin. Since the get-go of our advocacy in this space, we usually have at least ane sentence saying, 'if you really want to build good decentralized networks, Satoshi was able to build i without a pre-sale,'" said Van Valkenburgh.

Coin Center recently chosen on developers in the crypto space to work COVID-19 tracing mechanisms that maintain user privacy.