DECENT: A Domain Specific Language to Design Governance Decisions

Abstract

Decentralized ecosystems, such as the Bitcoin, claim to be decentralized to avoid power concentrations such as commercial banks. This is perhaps true for their operations, but often not the case for their governance, which is about deciding the rules of monitoring and controlling protocols. In previous work, we have developed DECENT a domain specific language (DSL) to conceptualize the domain of decentralized governance design. In this paper, we focus on deriving governance design decisions based on the DECENT language. We do so by taking the case of Fractional Reserve Banking (FRB), which is about governance rules for commercial banks to create and destroy money. As many banks are licensed to do FRB, under the control of national central banks and the European Central Bank (ECB), this is already a case of a decentralized ecosystem. The governance design decisions are developed in close cooperation with our case study partner, a commercial bank.