This month’s newsletter zooms in on Exit to Community (E2C) & walks you through the appearances and insights delivered by the BlockchainGov community during the mayhem that is June. Dive in with us!
🚀 A Milestone for BlockchainGov: Our First PhD (!)
We’re thrilled to announce that Tara Merk, a core member of BlockchainGov, has just defended her PhD in Pantheon-Assas. Tara is the first to complete a doctorate under the wing of BlockchainGov - a huge moment for our community. Her work dives deep into Exit to Community (E2C), a concept originally coined by @Nathan Schneider and now rabbitholed in the most beautiful way by Tara. Her PhD thesis “ Exit to Community: drivers, practices and pitfalls of user ownership transitions in the digital platform economy” is not yet available for the general public, so while we wait, now’s the perfect time to catch up on E2C.
(From L to R) Professor Florence Guillaume, Dr. Andrea Leiter, Professor Ellie Rennie, Professor Balázs Bodó, Dr. Nathan Schneider (on screen), the newly 'minted' Dr. Tara Merk, Dr. Morshed Mannan, and Dr. Primavera de Filippi
What is Exit to Community (E2C)?
E2C, introduced in 2019 by Nathan Schneider, a co-instigator of the #BuyTwitter campaign and advocate of platform cooperativism, serves as a pragmatic, ambitious, and critical response to the typical exit strategies employed by tech startups and digital platforms. These strategies often involve either selling to large corporations (acquisitions) or going public (IPOs). Unfortunately, such exits, as we are all familiar with, leave users, workers, and early supporters with little influence over the platform's future, and sometimes at odds with the decisions made by new owners.
As an example, earlier this year Zuckerberg, who still controls the majority of preferred stock in Meta, announced that Meta’s social media platforms would suspend fact checking and relax restrictions on discussions about gender and immigration. These changes were at his discretion and thousands of users, who disagreed with his new policies, were left with no recourse but to “vote with their feet” and engage in a mass exodus to other social media platforms.
E2C proposes an alternative to this: instead of “selling out”, founders and investors transition ownership and governance to the platform’s own community, users, workers, other stakeholders. This can be achieved through various legal and technical structures, such as cooperatives, trusts, foundations, or DAOs.
Tara Merk’s thesis takes us inside this transition, drawing on digital ethnographic research with organizations and stakeholders actively engaged in E2C. Her work aims to (1) situate E2C within existing academic discourses, (2) provide practical insights to strengthen the approach’s usability for organizations in the digital platform economy, and (3) surface potential pitfalls and unintended consequences that may arise for individuals and society as E2C becomes more widely adopted.
Congratulations again, Tara. Can’t wait to share it.
Want to dive deeper into the origin story of E2C?
Start here: 🗞️ Already in 2016, before the Twitter acquisition, Nathan Schneider proposed a bold idea in The Guardian:
"Let’s save Twitter by buying it - and turning it into a platform owned by its users."
It’s a cult status article.
📖 For a thoughtful narrative that traces E2C's origins and situates it within broader societal dynamics, don’t miss this piece in Noema Magazine.
📚 And if you want even more you can count on us! Explore our BlockchainGov Knowledge Base for research, readings, and tools on E2C, alegality, polycentricity, AI and more.
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Small selection to get you started:
📘Ours to Hack and to Own - The book that helped seed the platform cooperativism and E2C conversation.
June was an especially busy month for the decentralized governance community, and BlockchainGov was right in the thick of it. From conference stages to new research and fresh podcasts, here’s a look at what we’ve been up to:
⚖️ Delegation Risks: A Double-Edged Sword.
At ProtocolBerg during Berlin Blockchain Week, Silke Noa and Teresa Carballo dug into the risks that come with delegation in decentralized governance. Delegation can help scale participation, but it also opens the door to centralization, legal gray areas, and accountability issues.
🧠 Bottom line: Without both technical and social guardrails, delegation can end up recreating the very centralization it’s meant to avoid.
In Zurich (June 23–24), Theodor Beutel presented a paper co-authored with @Jamilya Kamalova and Eugene Leventhal: “Governance Futures: Catalyzing New Explorations in DAO Governance Mechanisms.” The session explored new directions in DAO design, from legal hybrids to algorithmic experiments, all with an eye on adaptability, inclusivity, and resilience.
Tara Merk took the stage at Funding the Commons to share insights on Exit to Community (E2C) and the evolving governance landscape around it. Her research is pushing the E2C conversation forward, both in theory and in practice.
🏛️ Countervailing Platform Power in Florence
Morshed Mannan joined the “Countervailing Platform Power” conference (June 26–27, Florence) to present: “The Antinomies of Autonomy: What DAOs can Learn From the Cooperative Experience.” The event brought together leading voices to unpack power, autonomy, and governance in today’s digital economy.
At EthCC, Primavera De Filippi sat down with Paul Dylan-Ennis and Elinor Rennie for a candid fireside chat circling around “Ethereum & Academia: Collaboration, Gaps, and Possibilities.” They took a hard look at Ethereum’s research ecosystem and what it’ll take to close the gap between academic research and protocol development.
Governance Futures Jamilya Kamalova, in partnership with Eugene Leventhal, just launched a new podcast all about governance! First podcast is due on the 10th of July. Stay tuned!
The main question Jamilya gets re: work **still from podcast teaser
📖 Forthcoming Book: How Decentralised Digital Security is Organised
Kelsie Nabben announced her forthcoming open access book, to be published soon, on the social and technical foundations of decentralized security. Through digital ethnography and case studies (including insights from the Security Alliance), the book explores how communities practicing decentralised technologies organize for security without central control.
Abstract in brief: What can decentralized tech communities teach us about digital security? This book investigates the paranoid mindsets, collective protocols, and infrastructural practices that underpin the crypto world—and what they might reveal about our broader digital futures.
