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Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – Newsletter 4 - November 3rd 2025 until November 17th 2025

Welcome to our fourth newsletter.Please let us know what you think. Feedback is always much appreciated. Feel free to share the newsletter with others. And if you want to contact us with interesting insights that should be in our newsletter as well, please do so via info@howtodao.it

In this edition

This week’s newsletter has the General Market update as well as the Scientific update section. Once again enjoy!

General DAO Market Update

Although DAOs create great opportunities, even DAOs can enter into turbulent times. Balancer endured a hack where approximately $100M in funds were stolen. Their DAO is now offering a bounty for recovery of the funds.
Furthermore, Lista DAO issued an urgent governance vote in light of USDX breaking their peg, to enforce the liquidation of their USDX-related holdings. Other more turbulent news was on Ocean Protocol that has been hit with a proposes class action suit of more than $100M for token manipulation and covenant breaches related to AI tool development. Finally, even amongst decentralization advocates, the level of decentralization is still a discussion given this opinion by AAVE founder on Uniswap Labs governance update proposals.

Beside the more turbulent news items, there were also new DAO implementations. A new DAO, at least for us – Japan DAO - promotes a model where creators and fans co-own next-generation anime and original IP, claiming to be already one of Japan largest DAO. VChat DAO, promoting local community DAOs in Vietnam was introduced. Through their DAO, token holders can propose ecosystem updates, fund development initiatives, or create community-driven campaigns. Another interesting development was the receival of the Bermuda Monetary Authority license for DerivaDEX, a decentralized derivative protocol, soon to be regulated in Bermuda. Two other new initiatives: DEIN, a decentralized insurance network, was announced and the very interesting initiative of Autonomous Forest, a DAO managing a forest and with that becoming a true commons DAO initiative, was introduced past week during Berlin Science week.

Furthermore there were some interesting exploration for DAO possibilities. A report by Brave New Coin was published on how DAOs are transforming the future of firms. On Binance they went even further in their opinion article stating that we could be moving from nation states to network states by the use of DAOs. Another more sector specific opinion article further explores Drug Research Funding by DAOs, mentioning VitaDAO as an example.

On the financial side of the market update, there as the news that DeXe is now also listed on Aster and that Illivium DAO starts new staking round on November 20th. Another interesting news item was the fact that Cecil DAO announced the fulfillment of its mission! Cecil DAO pledged to support a range of high-impact organizations operating across Africa and beyond and now has distributed their funds to all the foreseen partner charities. Great to see true community activities thrive. Hope we will hear more of them in the future. Finally, we already reported on buyback by DAOs (see earlier newsletters), but this article shows buybacks seem to be more popular ever.

In the other category of DAO news, two more items. First, Phala Network is migrating from its Polkadot parachain to an Ethereum L2 on November 20th, although it is still to us to which network. Secondly, the Vienna Blockchain Week had a panel on regulatory aspects of DAOs which is now published online.

Scientific Update

Of course there were also various interesting scientific articles published. The first one we would like to mention is one by long time DAO researcher Kaal who conducted a Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Market Meta Analysis identifying trends and challenges through six factors: decentralization, attack resistance, governance, regulatory compliance, work-to-earn mechanisms, and communication

A new interesting perspective was published in this scientific article by Nasib et al where they explore how DAOs can play a role in Islamic Financial Services. Some more general DAO papers and chapters regarding exploration of tokenized governance models by Pawar and the use of DAOs in governance of metaverses by Sankaran were published. A chapter by Akinradewo et al looking at broader legal and regulatory elements, also mention DAOs and their possible challenges to fit in corporate law structures. A whitepaper by Cesaretti was published that explores DAOs as Institutional Successors: Embedding Governance into Protocols In relation to the DeFi industry

A very interesting article was published by Davo et al on “The rise and fall of DAOstack”, one of the first DAO deployment platforms. It reveals valuable insights regarding governance and incentives for future DAOs.

Finally in the science update, two papers on DAOs and AI. The first one is a paper by Santhosh R et al that briefly explores how AI agents can be used in DAO governance. The other one is an interesting paper on a pathway towards AI enhanced DAO governance taking multiple factors regarding the proposal and decision flow into account upfront by Jansen and Verdot.

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