There’s an inherent paradox in crypto infrastructure today: If you want a system to be truly decentralized, you cannot retain unilateral control. But if you want serious risk and compliance controls (identity, sanctions, fraud), those controls usually imply centralized discretion. Historically, teams have resolved this in one of two broken ways: - They weaken compliance so decentralization survives - Or institutions retreat into private, permissioned systems that break DeFi composability Both outcomes are bad. Newton challenges this tradeoff directly. The core bet heading into 2026 is that regulatory clarity for crypto is accelerating. The CLARITY Act and parallel global frameworks all point in the same direction: onchain financial infrastructure will be expected to meet explicit, enforceable compliance standards. Today, most compliance in crypto is still primitive. Many stablecoins rely on basic OFAC checks, often enforced through admin-controlled contract upgrades. That may be acceptable for early experimentation, but it does not resemble real-world compliance. Real compliance is more demanding. It requires offchain data: identity verification, risk scoring, travel rule logic, fraud detection, and continuous monitoring. More importantly, it requires these controls to be enforced onchain in a way that is verifiable, auditable, and non-discretionary. Newton is designed for that reality. It moves compliance and risk enforcement out of centrally controlled systems and into a decentralized AVS operator network. Policies are standardized and evaluated by independent operators rather than a single company, making enforcement credibly neutral and eliminating unilateral control. Compliance does not scale when auditors and regulatory bodies must inspect bespoke implementations at every company. It scales when enforcement is standardized, credibly neutral, and shared. Newton functions as that shared substrate. This unlocks powerful abstractions. For example, Newton can offer publicly available policy templates that make a stablecoin automatically compatible with GENIUS Act requirements, designed to be easily plug-and-play into any smart contract. Rather than each issuer rebuilding compliance logic from scratch, Newton provides reusable, standardized compliance “LEGO blocks” that significantly reduce cost, complexity, and ongoing operational burden. In practice, no team wants to over-invest in bespoke compliance if it can be standardized and inherited from shared infrastructure. That’s the bet Newton is making, and why compliance, done right, becomes an enabler of decentralization rather than its enemy. twitter.com/seanli/status/2011...