HowtoDAO.it Newsletter 9 – Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – January 28th – February 10th 2026

Welcome to the ninth DAO newsletter. 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

A very interesting initiative has been launched by Brian Roemelle, the Zero-Human Company, chasing the ultimate form of an Autonomous Organization.  A blue print can be found in the Multi-Agent Models of Organizational Intelligence ideas by Vijayaraghavan et al. Vox even wrote a step by step tutorial how to do that.

A market analysis showed that many DAOs in 2025 made changes in their governance structures, often leading to more delegate structures. Also a trend in buy-backs of tokens, governance participation encouragement and other economic incentives was observed. It will be interesting to see what the effect of these actions on the performance of these DAOs will be in 2026. Another interesting opinion article by Chavda who emphasizes on the biggest short coming to their opinion in DAOs, being human governance. He also elaborates on how the “code is law” narrative is being abused in practice. Another research by Eigen Labs is very bullish on DAOs as the cost of code development diminishes, this truly contributes to the business case feasibility as DAO setup will be extremely cheap and now can truly be implemented at scale.

The OG of the “code is law discussion was done around “TheDAO”. TheDAO, the initiative that got DAOs going for many of us, is undergoing a “revival”. Part of the more that 70K ether that has been sitting still ever since the “DAOhack” will be allocated for DAO like grant funding through a new entity, “The DAO Fund”. The rest will be used for staking for network security.

From a legal perspective, an interesting opinion article was published on DAOs and liability of DAO participants. Another legal analysis by Holbein and Holbein on the interplay of DAOs and stablecoins in backlight of the GENIUS Act was published.

Some news on existing DAOs. First a new listing. DAI (MakerDAO) will now also be listed on WEEX. Furthermore, the decentralized gaming protocol, the DAO W3GG which primary focus is on building the largest Web3 gaming community, has announced its strategic partnership with the Web3 space exploration and strategy game Lussaio.

And as always, we highlight some new DAO-kids on the block(chain). First mention is Action Model which focusses on AI training Chrome extension with token rewards. Although not a DAO yet, they aim to evolve in a DAO. The second is SUBBD: the ai-powered evolution of the creator economy. merging AI tooling with DeFi, they aim to empower content ownership of creators, their audience, and their revenue streams. The third, although not completely new is Pi-Network who sped up their mainnet launch, including a DAO infrastructure. Not a true new DAOs but one is quite interesting to mention here as it is build on the Bitcoin sidechain Rootstock, is the RootstockCollective DAO. It enables community members to stake tokens, vote on proposals, and fund builders on Bitcoin. As always, we wish all these new DAOs the best and hope they will add true value to the ecosystem.

Scientific Update

Again in the past two weeks, it was a nice mixed bag of fields of expertise in the scientific publications. From business, to governance and legal, to DAO fundamentals.

An interesting master thesis by Reiter, who conducted research on key success factors of decentralized web3 business models. In his research he makes a comparison with web2 models. The research highlights the importance of community, decentralization, governance, and robust token economics in DAOs.

A very interesting chapter on DAOs, business opportunities and governance challenges by Rikken et al. This chapter gives a good overall description of DAOs and their various appearances, the business opportunities and potential purposes on the one hand and governance challenges on the other.

Normally decentralization in DAOs is being approached from a governance token division angle, but this interesting paper by Zhang et al, looked at operational task assignment within DAOs and found that the majority of tasks were assigned to a minority of contributors.

This chapter by Kavanagh and Dylan-Ennis explores blockchain based voting possibilities in the public sector where DAOs as mentioned as one of the possibilities.

From a legal angle, here an explorative paper on DAOs and legal possibilities and gaps under MiCAR and Armenian law by Ziety et al. with a brief exploration of international possibilities.