Hi all! I wanted to share that I attended DAWO26 — the 3rd European DAO Workshop — in Winterthur on July 6–7, and presented on how software encodes organizational control. Below are notes on the event and the key points from the talk, as part of the ZKsync Association Governance Team’s educational efforts this year.
About DAWO26
DAWO26 is hosted by ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, chaired by Michael Lustenberger and Florian Spychiger. It is a two-day academic workshop on DAOs as an organizational form, with keynotes this year from Quinn DuPont, Bryan Ford (EPFL), and Andrea Leiter (University of Amsterdam). The audience is predominantly academic — organizational theorists, governance researchers, cryptoeconomists — which made it a useful venue for putting ZKsync’s governance mechanics in front of people who study this for a living.
Software as a Substrate of Control — Workshop II: The Future of the Firm
Slides: npc.here.now/dawo2026workshop2control. Workshop II was co-moderated with Ying-Ying Hsieh (Imperial College).
The argument: control is steadily migrating into software, and once encoded it is inherited by whoever runs the organization next. Key points:
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Hard vs. soft control. Soft controls — policies, system prompts — request compliance and can be bypassed. Hard controls make the action unreachable. The test is whether a fully adversarial actor could still reach it: if yes, the control is advisory; if no, it is structural.
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Four case studies: multisigs, ZK token capped minters, version control, and runtime guardrails for autonomous agents. The range was the point — software control primitives predate both blockchain and AI agents, so only the principal is new.
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Capped minters as the worked example.
cap, the minting window, and the optional rate limit are set at deployment and immutable thereafter. The admin assigns and revokes the minter role; the minter chooses amount, timing, and destination within those fixed limits. Governance cannot raise a deployed minter’s cap — it can only authorize new minters or raise the token supply cap through a protocol upgrade. -
Constitutional vs. post-constitutional. Borrowing from Buchanan & Tullock (1962): rules are set once, at deployment, and actions occur within them. Immutable rules fix what is allowed, but not necessarily who decides which allowed actions get executed, or in what order.
Follow-up to the capped minter R&D
This builds directly on the framework work published here: Capped Minter Framework Update: R&D on Minter Mods and ZK Token Return, and on ZK Capped Minter V3. The academic framing (treating deployment as a constitutional moment rather than an administrative one) came out of that R&D.
Happy to discuss any of the above here or on a future Proposal Review Call.