Modular DAOs for Community-Based Resilience: A Blockchain Architecture for Critical Infrastructure Funding

Critical infrastructure systems in many countries face persistent financing and delivery challenges, including delayed disbursement, limited transparency, and constrained local participation. While blockchain-based systems have been proposed as alternatives, existing work primarily evaluates their technical properties rather than their ability to support resilience under disruption. This paper introduces Community-Based Resilience (CBR) as a framework for evaluating blockchain-enabled infrastructure financing. We propose a modular architecture based on decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) that enables project-level fundraising, tokenised ownership, and programmable governance through smart contracts on Ethereum-compatible networks. The system is implemented in Solidity and evaluated through static security analysis, gas-cost benchmarking across Ethereum and Layer-2 rollups, and an illustrative discrete-event simulation of fund reallocation under shock. The simulation is not calibrated to a deployed field system; rather, it is used to explore how governance latency and modular reallocation assumptions affect service-continuity metrics under a stylised scenario. Under those assumptions, DAO-based governance produces lower cumulative service loss than a donor-funded baseline, illustrating the design intent rather than validating field performance. The paper contributes a CBR-based evaluation framework, a modular DAO architecture, and a resilience-oriented methodology for assessing infrastructure systems under disruption.