News and Research articles on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs)

A workers’ inquiry in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations: Insights and policies to align blockchain-based work with the solidarity economy

Tara Merk, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)/University of Paris II
Laura Lotti, Independent researcher
Nick Houde, Independent researcher
Morshed Mannan, University of Edinburgh
PUBLISHED ON: 6 Feb 2026 DOI: 10.14763/2026.1.2053

This article explores working conditions in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and proposes mechanisms for DAOs to become more equitable workplaces, aligned with the solidarity economy.

The unusual DAO: An ethnography of building trust in “trustless” spaces

Tara Merk, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)/University of Paris II
PUBLISHED ON: 24 Sep 2024 DOI: 10.14763/2024.3.1795

This paper investigates decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) as a potential policy response to the issue of declining trust online and argues that while DAOs have privileged displacing the need for trust, they can also be designed to nourish trust thereby fostering participation and prosocial use cases.

This paper explores how four commonly proposed collective data intermediaries – data trusts, decentralised autonomous organisations, data cooperatives and data unions – have been envisioned and enacted by their proponents.