PANews reported on March 16th, citing Cointelegraph, that Friederike Ernst, co-founder of the Gnosis protocol, stated that the US CLARITY Act risks handing control of cryptocurrencies to centralized institutions. Ernst pointed out that the Act assumes all activity must go through centralized intermediaries, potentially causing the crypto space to fall into the hands of a few existing players. She emphasized that the real breakthrough of blockchain is not just new financial infrastructure, but also the ability for users to become network owners themselves. If activity is pushed back to institutional intermediaries, users may once again become customers renting financial technology, rather than stakeholders. Ernst acknowledged that the Act plays a positive role in clarifying the regulatory authority of the SEC and CFTC and protecting peer-to-peer transactions and self-custody, but its failure to adequately protect open, permissionless blockchain spaces and DeFi protocols could bring all the fault lines of the traditional financial system into the crypto space.