ABOUT DECaDE
DECaDE is the UKRI Next Stage Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy.

Since DECaDE was founded in 2020, we have witnessed major societal events such as the global pandemic, the war in Ukraine and world-wide public elections.

Cutting across all these events is the risk of fake news and misinformation; a risk heightened by how easily digital content can be created and shared. The progress in the power of creative tools, most recently generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), only serves to accelerate this risk further. It gives new urgency to DECaDE’s mission to shape the future digital economy model of work and value creation, ensuring a prosperous, safe and inclusive society for all.

We are proud of the impact DECaDE has made in contributing solutions to this major societal challenge, through the publication, commercial licensing, and open-source release of several media provenance technologies co-created with our industry partners. As one of the earliest members of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (member #38 of over 2500 currently!) DECaDE has influenced emerging standards in content provenance metadata and created impact both in creative products and broader thought leadership in the media provenance space.

DECaDE has also seen the rise and fall of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – a way to represent digital artwork as tokens that can be bought and sold in a decentralised global market via Distributed Ledgers (or ‘Blockchain’). During the global pandemic these became popular as traditional centralised creative markets were closed. Through projects such as ‘A Token Gesture’ DECaDE led some of the earliest user studies of NFTs and their strengths and weakness, proposing several innovations to advance this technology to create new fairer forms of a decentralised market that give creatives better agency over content re-use. This is an issue especially prominent today in the age of Generative AI where creatives need better control, and ways to enable recognition and rewards for the use of their data in AI via provenance technologies.

We are also proud of DECaDE’s impact to public policy through evidence submitted to several government consultations and presented at All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs). Most notably DECaDE researchers have engaged on a joint project with the Cabinet Office exploring Reduced Friction International Trade (RFIT) and run several workshops to help shape emerging policy and solutions around the recent Electronic Documents Act. DECaDE continues to explore provenance enhancing tools such as NFT and Distributed Ledgers to push this work forward with our public sector partners.

Stepping back from these verticals, DECaDE is fundamentally about supply chains – be it the integrity and trust in media content, of electronic bills of lading for shipped goods or even of physical foodstuffs such as chocolate. In investigating these patterns, and solutions for supply chain in our decentralised digital economy, DECaDE is excited to create further impact in our increasingly decentralised digital economy.