1. DAOs have not achieved mainstream adoption

• Most DAOs remain small, experimental, or speculative (primarily focused on crypto-native governance and treasury management).
• There are over 12,000 DAOs, yet only a handful have meaningful real-world impact or large, active communities (e.g. Cardano, MakerDAO, Gitcoin, Optimism Collective).
• Many DAOs remain stagnant or dormant after launch, with governance fatigue, low voter participation, and tooling complexity cited as barriers.

2. DAOs are struggling with core functionality – common issues include:

• Poor onboarding and accessibility for non-technical users
• Low engagement (voter turnout often below 10%)
• Capture by early contributors, resulting in power centralisation not representative of the group
• Fragmentation of tools and no canonical “stack”
• Inflexible governance mechanisms that don’t reflect community / group dynamics

3. Scholars and practitioners are publicly questioning the DAO model – There’s a growing body of critical writing:

• “Inclusivity and Science Orientation of DAO: Problems and Prospects” by Olalekan Asikhia and Olusegun Vincent https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387082176_INCLUSIVITY_AND_SCIENCE_ORIENTATION_OF_DAO_PROBLEMS_AND_PROSPECTS
• “Empowering Indigenous Communities through DAOs: Collective Decision-Making and Sustainability” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/empowering-indigenous-communities-through-daos-collective-ehxbc
• “DAOs: Why Sovereign Accountable Commons Might Be Better” by Holochain https://blog.holochain.org/daos-why-sovereign-accountable-commons-might-be-better/
• “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Stewardship Talks but Agency Walks” by Jongsung Kim and Jae-Hyeon Ahn https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296324001760
• “Dealing with Blame in Digital Ecosystems: The DAO Failure in the Ethereum Blockchain” by Tristan Partridge https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162525001271

**4. In the Cardano ecosystem specifically…**The DAO ecosystem is still nascent: