With the onset of decentralized systems from finances to utility, there is one threat to the systems which worries me: the intensification of central agents who would start directing the design of the decentralized systems. Take the example of bitcoin, where the whales (or the people who own a large amount of bitcoin) control the market. Now, these whales are the early investors in bitcoin, and no doubt they should get rewards as per their risks. But, this also demands good regulations to ensure that other small investors can still enter this market, unlike a controlled oligopoly where entry to the market is costliest.
There are other examples in a non-blockchain-non-crypto world, where such decentralization changes to the system have done much more harm than doing good to the system. Some examples of accountability issues and intensifying power of the central authority (from regulators):
Different regulations are needed which can make sure that the regulator/ richer investors don't become another controlling authority of the system. Some of the regulations, which I experimented with in my research thesis (mechanisms to prevent energy trading discrimination) focused on empowering every user equally irrespective of the time they enter and the value they have in the decentralized platform. Some of these regulations which can be directly implemented on the platform are:
Anonymize the data not just by the user identity but by how much assets they have on the platform.
Split the assets of everyone in chunks equivalent to the lowest value of the asset. This is something I call as bid split - if a user owns 80 USD value and the poorest own 0.1 USD, then the first user gets identified as 800 different users and the poorest as one.
Just opposite to the above regulation, there can be bid aggregation - allow a number of small users to come together and appear as one user (there should be a threshold on this). This is similar to the idea of a cooperative.
Allow different types of goods to be traded in exchange.
The peer-to-peer contract would have higher priority than the contracts of the platform. This increases trust in the system (but lobbying can be another consequence here too).