Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – Newsletter 2
October 7th 2025 until October 20st 2025
Welcome to our second newsletter. Thank you all for all the great feedback and all the new signups. Much appreciated and it shows that many share their interest in this great topic / development! If you think this newsletter is interesting for others as well, please share it with them and us (info@howtodao.it). Once again enjoy!
In this edition
General Market update
AI x DAO
Scientific news
General Market update
Decentralized Science
A cool innovation was shown by DeSci DAO Elata Bioscience that launched an electroencephalogram (brainwave controlled) pong tournament at the Token2049 event, where competitors moved paddles across screens without touching a single button. A nice example how collaborative science can bring us further.
Economic
From a more economic DAO news perspective, Multichain DEX aggregator ShapeShift announced support for shielded (private) transactions with the Zcash privacy cryptocurrency. The Solana based DAO deployment / ICO lauch platform, that uses futarchy as governance model (more on futarchy in the science section of this newsletter!) refused a discount for investors although the investment will be needed to extend runway. Lastly, Yield Guild Games, one of the older DAOs around, focusing on P2E (Play2Earn), announced that is well now be listed on UpBit as well. Finally, Jupiter DAO, a Solana based DEX announces some major changes in their governance model.
New kids on the block
There are also some new DAO “kids” on the block. One of them being K-POP DAO that want to create the world's first immersive web3 fandom ecosystem dedicated to K-pop and Korean culture. Then there is WonderChain that want to move our world from a structure centered on private interests to one centered on collective benefit, supported by blockchain technology and being active in real-world community activities. We hope that these newcomers will thrive of course, let’s see...
AI x DAO
On the crossroad of DAOs and AI, there were some interesting developments and news items as well in the past two weeks.
Decentralized artificial intelligence economy
First, there was the introduction of Sentient, an open-source protocol platform dedicated to building a decentralized artificial intelligence economy. Its core goal is to establish an ownership structure for AI models. Furthermore, Somnia was introduced, aiming to lead a new era of digital transformation by merging AI, blockchain, and immersive virtual environments into one open, interoperable ecosystem. Well follow both DAOs with interest!
AI-driven governance
Another interesting development was the announcement of ARK DAO planning to launch an AI-driven DAO governance framework - enabling AI models to simulate policies, provide decision-making suggestions, and issue risk warnings, while also allowing global token holders to participate in proposals and voting. We will monitor how this roll out will go, also with ethics and (human) control in the back of our minds.
On a more scientific not, Sharma et all conducted an research on how DAOs can be used in AI governance in their study: Aligning AI with Public Values: Deliberation and Decision-Making for Governing Multimodal LLMs in Political Video Analysis.
Scientific news
There was a lot of news in the science corner. In the past weeks, various papers on delegation, empowerment and governance structures within DAOs were published:
Delegation
Messias and Ide, published a highly interesting paper on “Fairness in Token Delegation: Mitigating Voting Power Concentration in DAOs”. They found that voting of delegates often does not align with the primary interest of the tokenholders delegating their vote! Soleimanof and Neufeld conducted a research Empowerment of DAO participants. They concluded that there are three key factors for empowerment – promoting autonomy, ensuring transparency and fostering communication.
Another paper on delegation was published by Ma et all. They looked at determinants of delegation outcomes using stewardship theory. They find that intrinsic motivation, affective commitment, and normative commitment significantly enhance delegation outcomes. Jensen et all explore how DAOs allocate funds to pursue strategic aims. Two main dilemma’s / tensions were identified: collective vs representational governance and pursuing synergistic growth vs pursuing competitive growth. Finally in the governance research side, on interesting paper on Futarchy in decentralized science was presented by Weidener and Shilina
Use cases
Also, there were various use case driven researches and explorations published:
Zhang et all, explore how serverless cross-device and cross-decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) knowledge transfer and fusions for Internet of Vehicles. A university model grounded in the principles of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was presented by Kuehn, Decentralized Political (Parties) as possibilities for Kingdom of Tonga by Edwin Liava'a and the use of DAOs in Automated Optical Inspection to tackle the problem of data-islands and more collaboration by Cao et all.
Taxation
Finally, this book on Fintech by Hoven et all, included a chapter that makes a first high level reconnaissance on taxation of DAOs.
