By Sheraz Ahmed, Managing Partner at STORM Partners
This column was first published in French by Allnews on October 23rd, 2026. Read the original in French.
Web3 promises to redistribute power. For institutions that want to engage with it, the real question lies elsewhere. Who decides, who signs and who is accountable?
Back from Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul and TOKEN2049 in Singapore, I have been thinking about a paradox of Web3. Its drive to distribute power can make collective action harder. In Seoul, Jeff Yan, co-founder of the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, highlighted the potential of private markets, where much of today’s wealth is created within a small circle of investors. Keeping that promise of openness still takes someone to decide, fund and execute.
When Responsibility Is Scattered
Decentralization aims to limit the concentration of power. When many independent participants validate transactions under public rules, no single intermediary can block the system on its own. That property is valuable. Yet it says nothing about how a team hires, raises funds or closes a partnership. A ledger can be decentralized. A project always needs someone in charge.
Around the major public blockchains, known as “layer one” networks, several players usually coexist: a foundation, a development company often called “labs”, validators who run the network and a community of token holders who vote on certain changes. This plurality protects the network from being taken over by a single player. It becomes a brake when mandates overlap and nobody can settle a disagreement.
For a long time, banks favored private blockchains, where they control access and the rules. They are increasingly turning to public networks, at least for part of their business, because that is where the liquidity and the counterparties are. In 2024, UBS launched a tokenized money market fund, meaning one issued as digital tokens, on Ethereum, the public blockchain most used for this kind of asset. On a private blockchain, the bank or its consortium decides. On a public network, it depends on decisions it does not control.
JPMorgan is a telling case. After years on its private platform Onyx, renamed Kinexys in 2024, the bank launched a token representing dollar deposits in 2025 on Base, a public network built on Ethereum.
Imagine a private bank that wants to launch a product on one of these networks and needs specific development work to do it. The foundation has the resources, the development company employs the engineers, and some decisions are put to a community vote. Who signs the contract? Who releases the budget? Who owns the timeline? Without a clear answer, the partnership stalls. The obstacle is then less technological than organizational. The more counterparts there are, the harder it becomes to find the one who is responsible.
The Swiss Foundation and the Test of Execution
Switzerland holds a special place in this story. In 2014, Ethereum set up in Zug and chose a non-profit foundation to protect its vision from the pursuit of profit. Others followed its lead, and many networks have since established themselves in Switzerland. A foundation dedicates capital to a specific purpose, with no shareholders to pay.
One point is often misunderstood. A foundation does not “own” the network it supports. It is governed by its foundation board. Holding a network’s tokens does not, in principle, give any rights over its foundation, and the foundation does not control the protocol on its own. It therefore has to work with the development teams and the other players in the network.
In April 2025, the Ethereum Foundation itself clarified how it is organized. Oversight and vision sit with the board. Strategic and operational execution sits with management. The principle is simple. Teams get defined decision-making power, together with an obligation to account for it. Delegating in this way does not betray decentralization, as long as the major directions remain subject to collective oversight.
Distributing Power and Organizing Action
So how do you get autonomous players to move forward together? In Singapore, the answer came from the regulator. With Project Guardian, the country’s monetary authority has brought financial institutions together around concrete tokenization projects. The question, then, is not a choice between centralization and decentralization. It is how to organize decisions that commit several parties.
Switzerland offers another path in federalism, a system it knows well. Under the principle of subsidiarity, a task moves up from the municipality to the canton, and then to the Confederation, only when there is good reason to. Applied to Web3, the principle comes down to three rules: decide at the right level, set the limits of each mandate and plan how disagreements will be settled. A budget approved by the community should then allow the responsible team to move ahead without renegotiating every operational choice.
For an investor or an institutional partner, how clearly this organization can be read therefore deserves as much attention as the technology. Before signing, you need to know who can actually commit resources, who has the final say in a disagreement, and to whom each party answers for the results.
These questions appear in no technical white paper. Answering them means mapping the players, identifying the right counterparts and structuring the partnership so that it holds up through a governance vote or a change of team. This work belongs neither to the lawyer alone, nor to the engineer alone, nor to the banker alone. Institutions that want to build solutions on these networks have every reason to work with a specialist advisor who speaks the language of protocols as well as that of a risk committee.
Decentralization can then keep its promise. Power is shared, but responsibility for action is clear.