Editorial: DAO, governance and fairness

Across the collection, three themes stand out: fair representation in voting and delegation, governance beyond standard token-weighted models, and DAO-based coordination across financial and real-world settings.One of the most persistent questions in DAO governance is how to support broad participation without allowing decision-making power to become overly concentrated in the hands of large token holders or a small number of intermediaries. Two articles in this collection examine this problem from different but closely related perspectives.Tamai and Kasahara study whale dominance and collusion in DAO voting. They show that reducing whale influence may also make collusion easier, and propose combining Quadratic Voting with voteescrowed tokens to better balance fairness and strategic resistance.Weidener, Laredo, Kumar, and Compton examine delegated voting as a way to improve governance scalability. Their review shows that while delegation can reduce participation costs, it may also concentrate influence in a small set of delegates, leaving representation and accountability as open challenges.A second theme in this collection asks how DAO governance is changing more broadly. Rather than treating token-weighted voting as the default endpoint, these articles explore how governance can evolve toward different organizational forms and different ways of linking decisions to outcomes.Bennett examines the governance evolution of Hypha, tracing its move beyond conventional tokenweighted voting toward a human-centered model of coordination. The paper's DAO 1.0/2.0/3.0 distinction offers a useful way to think about governance maturity in a broader DAO scope.Weidener and Shilina explore futarchy in Decentralized Science (DeSci) DAOs as an alternative to conventional token voting. Their study suggests that outcome-oriented governance based on prediction markets can, under certain assumptions, align closely with token-vote outcomes, while also introducing a different basis for collective decision-making. At the same time, they note practical limits such as low participation and skewed token distributions.The final theme in the collection highlights the range of settings in which DAO governance now matters.Here the emphasis is less on governance mechanisms in the abstract and more on what governance design looks like when it is embedded in specific financial or social contexts.Feng, Mohanty, and Krishnamachari study MakerDAO's DAI stablecoin and show that its stability depends not only on technical design, but also on market expectations and collective belief. Their analysis highlights how governance outcomes in DeFi are shaped by the interaction between protocol rules, market behavior, and supporting infrastructure.Lustenberger, Wollenschläger, and Küng extend DAO governance to collaborative housing. Drawing on DAO research and Ostrom's principles for common-pool resource governance, they show how blockchain-based coordination may support transparent accounting, distributed decision-making, and rule enforcement in real-world communities.Several challenges run across the contributions in this collection. One is the continuing tension between decentralization and efficiency: mechanisms that distribute influence more broadly often introduce additional complexity, coordination cost, or slower decision-making. Another is the gap between on-chain governance and off-chain social process, since forums, delegate networks, and community norms continue to shape outcomes in ways that formal models only partly capture. A further challenge is institutional translation. As DAO-based systems move into areas such as science funding, housing, and financial coordination, they must also engage with legal, regulatory, and organizational constraints that lie beyond smart contract design alone. Finally, empirical evidence from deployed DAO governance remains limited, and more longitudinal, practice-grounded evaluation will be important for understanding how these systems actually perform over time.The six articles in this Research Topic reflect the growing breadth of DAO governance research. Together, they show that governance and fairness are central to decentralized organization. Addressing these issues requires not only technical design, but also attention to representation, accountability, and institutional context. We hope this collection helps advance that discussion.