Decentralized in Name Only: The Centralization of DAO Labor

Lingling Zhang, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri
January 2026

Abstract

This paper investigates the centralization of labor within Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), revealing how despite their decentralized structure, power and work tend to concentrate among a small group of participants.

Type
Conference paper
Publication
Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference

This work examines how labor and influence become centralized in DAOs despite their decentralized governance structures.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Blockchain Social Networks Labor Studies Web Science
Lingling Zhang
Lingling Zhang
PhD Student

Lingling Zhang is a PhD student in the Human-Centered Machine Intelligence Lab, working on privacy-first cloud resource prediction.

Morteza Zihayat
Morteza Zihayat
Principal Investigator

Dr. Morteza Zihayat is a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Human-Centered AI and Associate Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science. He also holds appointments as Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo (Management Sciences) and IBM Faculty Fellow at IBM Centre for Advanced Studies. He is the Director of the Human-Centered Machine Intelligence Lab.