We are proud of the impact DECaDE has made through the publication, commercial licensing and open-source release of provenance technologies with our industry partners.
Since DECaDE was founded, we have seen a rise in fake news and misinformation, a risk more evident with the progress of Artificial Intelligence. As a member of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative, DECaDE has influenced and impacted standards in content provenance metadata and thought leadership in the media provenance space.
DECaDE researchers led some of the earliest user studies of non-fungible tokens and their strengths and weaknesses, proposing innovations to advance this technology to create fairer forms of a decentralised market that gives creatives better agency over re-use.
Working on a joint project – Reduced International Trade (RFIT) – with the Cabinet Office and HMRC, DECaDE looked towards Distributed Ledger Technology to help shape the 2025 UK Border Strategy, resulting in publishing the Governance Framework for the Evolution of UK Cross-Border Trade Ecosystem .
DECaDE looks ahead to create impact in our increasingly decentralised digital economy, by developing technological solutions to enable a prosperous and safe digital society for all.
It has been a privilege to Chair the Independent Advisory Board for the DECaDE programme. DECaDE has delivered impressive results and crucially, demonstrable impact. It’s work has informed commercial practice and directly influenced policy thinking showing how research-led innovation can shape decision making across government and industry.”
Nick Davies
Director, International Centre for Digital Trade and Innovation and former Innovation Lead, HMRC.
Our Impact
3
patents
jointly filed
126
Papers
published
5
Academic
Awards and
RECOGNITIONS
£2.3m
Additional
funding
secured
23
Policy
Engagements
35
Commercial
Partners
79
Engagement
Activities
Research Spotlights
Fighting fake news in the age of Generative AI
Creating frictionless trade at our borders
Enabling creatives to share their work, while preserving privacy and rights
DECENTRALISED SERVICE DESIGN: DSD Playbook
DECaDE have developed new innovative co-creation methods and workshops to explore the implications of Distributed Ledger Technology. The DSD Playbook enables practitioners beyond academia to develop and run their own co-creation workshops and design activities, to explore how services may evolve in a decentralised digital economy.
ORAgen: Agency, Rights and attribution
DECaDE’S ORAgen project and subsequent ORAgen Fables interactive, builds on the ORA protocol – Ownership, Rights and Attribution – an innovative framework developed by DECaDE and its industry partners to license media content. ORA combines the C2PA open standard with media tokenisation and Distributed ledger technologies (for ownership provenance) and open standards for rights.
TIME to ACCCT - Access, Control, consent,
compensation and transparency
Research
Engagement
To further DECaDE’s engagement we regularly attend conferences, workshops and Government consultations.
To understand our impact in the real-world we run Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Field labs facilitated by Digital Catapult, focused on solving coordination challenges and fast tracking research translation.
DECaDE Symposium on the Decentralised Digital Economy – 25th March 2026, The Royal Society, London
On 25 March 2026, DECaDE welcomed researchers, policymakers, industry leaders and innovators to the historic Royal Society in London to explore the future of the decentralised digital economy. The symposium opened with an address from Lord Holmes of Richmond MBE and featured thought-provoking discussions, lightning talks and demonstrations showcasing DECaDE’s latest research and innovations.
Topics included the future of digital trade and supply chains, media provenance and creator attribution, tackling misinformation, and emerging technologies shaping the decentralised digital economy. Watch the highlights from the event and discover how DECaDE research is helping to shape a trusted and decentralised digital economy.
Digital Economy Next Stage Symposium (DE-Nexus)
The event which took place on 10th June 2024, brought together six EPSRC funded Next Stage Digital Economy Centres to showcase outputs and impacts of socio-technical research in the UK and was attended by industry, academics and UKRI representatives. Each of the centres have a focus on harnessing digital technologies for our economy, our communities, our cultural lives, and our health and wellbeing which has led to impact on policy, patents, publications in the UK.Collaboration
DECaDE collaborates with industry, government policy members and public sector end-users to co-create adventurous and exciting research to shape the evolution of the digital economy towards a new 21st-century model of work and value creation.
