HowtoDAO.it Newsletter 10 – (Decentralized) Autonomous Organizations – February 11th – March 2nd 2026J

Welcome to the tenth newsletter on (Decentralized) Autonomous Organizations. If you have interesting insights that should be in our newsletter as well, please let us know via info@howtodao.it.  Enjoy the read!

In this week’s newsletter the General Market and a Broad Scientific update section!

General DAO Market Update

We start with some legal related news. DerivaDEX has launched a regulated crypto derivatives trading platform after receiving a test license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority. Also the state of Virginia passed a bill, paving the way to DAO legal structures in the state.

An interesting opinion article was published by BlockchainReporter, on DAO governance. They argue that although a DAO looks ideal to code governance, one cannot code away human behavior in a DAO. Another opinion article focusses on DAOs beyond DeFi and they are reshaping digital coordination. Ethereum is experiencing renewed activity in the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) sector, indicating a resurgence of interest and innovation in this area. The Curve Finance DAO founder argues that within DAOs, disagreements are a healthy sign.

Vitalik Buterin argues that DAOs should work on LLM integration to enhance the governance processes and participation. We will elaborate more on AI enhanced DAOs in the near future.

Some DAO economic news. Another buy back decision, following multiple other DAOs in the past months, Jupiter DAO decided to perform open market buy backs of their tokens. AAVE proposes an overhaul to streamline all the revenues from their suite’s of product the DAO’s treasury. More AAVE news, but this time that one of their longest-tenure service providers, Bored Ghosts Developing (BGD) Labs is leaving AAVE as result of all the internal tumult in the DAO. On the positive site, AAVE surpassed the 1 Trillion $ mark in cumulated lending volume.

And as always, we highlight some new DAO-kids on the block(chain).  This time we have Global Tender DAO, interestingly enough just launched and already claiming to have massive usage, although these numbers could be overall global numbers outside the DAO. Let’s monitor how this keeps up and if the numbers proof to be true. Another one worth mentioning is XAO DAO, a hybrid DAO, build for the Ripple ecosystem focusing on microgrants. As always, we wish all these new DAOs the best and hope they will add true value to the ecosystem.

Scientific Update

First some modeling, governance and tokenomics related scientific contributions of the last few weeks. In their chapter, Norta et al present a modelling approach for crucial design and development phases of DAOs, focusing on early stage involvement of both technical as non-technical stakeholders in the process. In their paper on blockchain governance and tokenomics, Khyzhniak and Kinkelin propose a dual token DAO to promote resource sharing amongst distributed resource testbeds.

From a functional angle, there were also multiple scientific contributions. First we want to mention this great chapter by Rikken et al on opportunities and risks for DAOs in the Public Sector. This conference paper by Huang presents how DAOs can play a role in participative budgeting and can coordinate stakeholder responses without centralized control in resilient tourism in destination crisis management. Tian explores how decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) can address environmental sustainability in this chapter and concludes that there should be more awareness in the supply chain, standards, accountabilities and education to promote adoption of DAOs. This paper by Mamun elaborates on Reimagining Institutionalism and how DAOs can help regions characterized by historical "institutional voids" to leapfrog into a new era.

More legally and standardization related scientific contributions were also published. The article, from disruption to design: regulating financial intermediation in the digital age by Pellegrinni, analyses how, amongst others,  DAOs are reshaping the architecture of financial markets,adopting a comparative and forward-looking approach, critically examining recent regulatory developments. Another legal focused paper by Cline, elaborates on DAO governance and regulation and argues that some existing frameworks fall short and comes with proposals for a practical path towards legally sound DAOs. This research by Anderson et al analyzes how international standards, decentralized autonomous organizations, and multi-stakeholder governance bodies contribute to cross-border digital infrastructure. They reveal that hybrid governance models combining decentralized consensus with structured oversight demonstrate the most promising outcomes.