HowtoDAO.it Newsletter 11 – (Decentralized) Autonomous Organizations – March 3rd - March 20th 2026

Welcome to the eleventh 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 an interview with Hinkle, who elaborates on the benefits of DAOs in dividend sharing. By the nature of DAOs and their governance and treasury processes, it makes this a lot easier. Another interesting article was written by Amure, who elaborates on how to deploy AI agents in DAOs using integrated LLMs. Bidget made a nice little overview of what they consider successful DAO case studies: makerdao, uniswap & governance models 2026. Another interesting development is that TRON DAO joins agentic AI foundation as founder sees future in AI.

The AAVE saga continues. In a first vote, the “AAVE will win” proposal representing a fundamental restructuring of financial flows within the Aave ecosystem, has gained a 52.58% majority. Furthermore, the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), serving as a primary delegate and service provider to the Aave DAO, has announced it will not renew its partnership with the DAO and plans to phase out its services over the next four months. AAVE releases security framework ahead of aave v4 launch. The organization said in a forum post that the security program spanned roughly 345 cumulative days of review and was backed by a $1.5 million budget approved by the AAVE DAO. Kulechov, CEO of AAVE, stated that DAOs have become “extraordinarily difficult” and politicized structures that hinder innovation and operational efficiency. Kulechov advocates for a hybrid model where DAO governance is limited to crucial decisions, e.g. related to strategy, while leaving execution to leaders to streamline processes.

It is always a discussion what you legally posses when you hold tokens. Across, a blockchain interoperability protocol, has posted a temperature check proposal exploring a shift from a DAO structure to a U.S. C-corporation, where ACX tokenholders could exchange tokens for equity, thus creating clarity from a legal possession point of view. Charles Hoskinson called for a revote in a governance dispute related to the Liqwid decentralized finance protocol relating to the allocation of NIGHT tokens in the Liqwid DAO governance protocol.

Some more DAO economic news. BlackRock and Apollo Global Management have acquired significant stakes in UniSwap DAO and MORPHO DAO, for investment purposes, but also to actively participate in its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Where other DAOs focused much on token buy backs recently, GMX started question this strategy and changed their token pricing strategy, which seems to lead to positive results at the moment. Also SKY, former MakerDAO, decided to slash buy backs. This to fortify their core reserves. Furthermore, crypto losses from hacks and scams fell sharply in February, the largest was a $10 million theft from YieldBlox, a lending pool on the Stellar network managed by a decentralized autonomous organization. World Liberty Financial (WLFI) has secured overwhelming community support for a transformative staking governance framework, fundamentally reshaping token holder participation. Tally, a leading governance platform for more than 500 crypto DAOs including Uniswap and Arbitrum, is shutting down after six years. Bertram (CEO Tally) argues that the Biden-era SEC under Gary Gensler effectively forced decentralization through legal risk, but the Trump administration's more permissive stance has made DAO-style governance optional, undermining demand for tools like Tally.

Many partnerships were also announced. M3 DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that builds a comprehensive multi-chain Web3 ecosystem integrating the metaverse, has announced its strategic partnership with AscendEX, for the purpose to expand market reach and foster ecosystem growth worldwide. M3 also announced a partnership with KinsVerse. Open Campus DAO, focused on blockchain applications in education, will collaborate with Vietnam’s Le & Associates (L&A) and SKALE to pilot a credential-powered job matching initiative in Vietnam. More partnerships, 21DAO partners with FOGNET Blockchain to advance DAO participation with RWA/DeFi offerings. Block Sec Arena has made an important strategic partnership announcement with WORLD3 focusing on “AI Autonomous Worlds” (AI-AW), an AI framework for human users together with AI Agents, both co-existing in the automated and decentralized environments of the metaverse.

And as always, we highlight some new DAO-kids on the block(chain). First up, AI16Z cryptocurrency, a blockchain project merging artificial intelligence with decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance. The name sounds a bit too familiar and alike with a respectable player in the Web3 market…. NovaDEX represents a decentralized exchange (DEX) infrastructure designed to facilitate peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading without centralized intermediaries. As always, we wish all these new DAOs the best and hope they will add true value to the ecosystem.

Scientific Update

DAOs and AI are mentioned in combination quite often. Although we would love to read more on AI integration in DAO possibilities, the majority is still in DAOs or Blockchain for AI. Sharma et al published a paper on democratic governance through DAO-based deliberation and voting for inclusive decision making in AI models. They developed a democratic decision framework utilizing Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to enable underserved groups to deliberate and reach a consensus on key AI issues.

In their study, Deng and Tang, go into governance mechanism design for multiple partners involved in a new platform. They demonstrate that governance evolution is a continuous balancing process between centralization and decentralization in response to multi-actor motivations and information conditions.

Baranski et al in their work on internet voting maturity framework — quantifying maturity in internet voting protocols, created a trust-centric maturity scoring framework to quantify the security and maturity of seventeen internet voting systems, including DAOs providing an extendable toolkit for policy makers and technology experts alike for objective comparison.

A very interesting take by Tchuente on limits on DAO governance. He shows a “too big to monitor” mechanism in DAO governance: when proposal flow grows faster than broad participation can keep up, effective control may drift toward a smaller set of highly active participants.

An interesting use case study for DAOs in the pharmaceutical sector was published by Patil et al. Stating that DAOs offer a promising alternative to traditional hierarchical systems by promoting innovation and empowering stakeholders, but also face significant challenges, including regulatory uncertainty, data protection, and ensuring long-term sustainability. Another interesting case study was published by Groshev and Ferrer. They foresee a role for DAOs in robotics, embracing the concept of the RObotic DEcentralized Organization (RODEO), a blockchain-based framework that integrates trust and accountability mechanisms for robots. Their research give insights about how robots and organizations can coordinate tasks and payments with auditable execution proofs and on-chain settlement. A study on possibilities of DAOs on employment generation in the public sector was published by Saxena et al. They indicate that decentralized systems can help improve transparency, reliability and inclusion in public-sector employment programs.