Gov-Acc Pipeline.

The Dao of the DAO: Eastern Philosophies in Decentralized Worlds Helena Rong1, Zhe Sun2 1 New York University Shanghai, Shanghai, China 2 Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China Abstract In chapter 62 of Daodejing, Laozi describes the Dao as “the hearth and home of the ten thousand things. Good souls treasure it, lost souls find shelter in it.” Contemporary DAOs are often framed within Western discourses of decentralization, autonomy, and Web 3.0 innovation. However, emerging practices–especially in Chinese-speaking communities–reveal a distinctive layer of cultural imagination deeply rooted in Eastern thought. This research proposes to understand DAOs from Eastern philosophies by examining how Daoist principles inform the values and practices of DAO communities in Asia to articulate alternative visions of autonomy, community, and social organization. Concepts such as wú-wéi (non-action) and xiāo-yáo (carefree wandering) are increasingly referenced in the context of blockchain governance in the East. Using SeeDAO, a prominent DAO in the Chinese-speaking Web3 space, as a focal point, this study will explore how concepts such as non-action governance, the “Dao follows nature”, and “emergence” are operationalized in digital governance practices. The research seeks to make three key contributions: first, to elucidate the lived experiences and ethical visions of DAO participants in China; second, to provide a culturally grounded theory of decentralized governance rooted in Eastern philosophical paradigms; and third, to explore how ancient philosophical ideas find renewed life in emergent socio-technical forms. Keywords Decentralized Autonomous Organization, Daoism, Governance, Eastern Philosophy, Community Governance, Blockchains 1. Introduction Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have emerged as one of the most widely discussed organizational experiments within the Web 3.0 ecosystem. Scholars have examined DAOs as instances of algorithmic governance (DuPont, 2019; Reijers et al., 2021), as novel forms of collective coordination (Hassan & De Filippi, 2021), and as extensions of blockchain’s promise of disintermediation (De Filippi & Wright, 2018). Much of this literature, however, has emerged from Western contexts, where DAOs are often theorized through pragmatic lenses as function-driven systems for investment coordination, governance automation, or collective ownership. Consequently, the discourse has prioritized an instrumental rationality that is expressed through a focus on the technical architecture, economic incentive design, and compliance over inquiries into the cultural and ethical dimensions that may shape decentralized organizations in other civilizational and institutional contexts. Against this backdrop, China offers a particularly compelling site of inquiry. Although blockchain-based projects operate under significant regulatory constraints, grassroots DAOs have nonetheless taken shape, articulating orientations that extend well beyond market-driven experimentation. While Western DAOs span a broad functional spectrum–from protocol governance and fractional ownership to creative and social networks–their design ethos has largely centered on optimizing coordination and value creation. Chinese DAOs, by contrast, tend to reinterpret decentralization as a moral and philosophical project, extending technological coordination into the domains of community ethics and spiritual practice. These practices resonate with classical Chinese ideas of wu-wei 无为 (non-action), xiāo-yáo 逍遥 (carefree wandering), and yīn-yáng 阴阳 (harmonization), linking governance and collectivity to older cosmologies of relational equilibrium. This paper investigates the case study of SeeDAO, widely recognized as one of China’s most active and enduring DAOs, to explore how such communities experiment with organizational and spiritual innovation. The research is guided by two central research questions: ● RQ1. In terms of organizational form, how do Chinese DAOs differ from their Western counterparts? ● RQ2. At both a social and spiritual level, have Chinese DAOs generated new orientations that could offer alternative directions for organizational transformation more broadly? Methodologically, the study combines in-depth interviews with eleven core members of SeeDAO and participant observation of its governance cycles and community events. These first-hand data allow us to trace SeeDAO’s evolving trajectory and theorize its broader significance. Theoretically, the paper reinterprets decentralization as a process of moral and spiritual cultivation rather than a purely functional pursuit of efficiency or autonomy. We draw on two contrasting but complementary perspectives. First, social anthropologist Xiang Biao’s (2011) analysis of “global body shopping” foregrounds the continuity of social and institutional constraints within seemingly global digital mobility, showing how transnational IT labor of the “Y2K” era remains tethered to corporate hierarchies and national frameworks, raising the question of whether Web3-enabled organizations in China can transcend inherited frameworks and produce genuinely novel collective forms. Second, Ohlhaver, Buterin, and Weyl (2022) articulate a transformative vision of the “decentralized society,” where Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) could anchor identity and cooperation in non-market relational networks they refer to as “souls.” While the former exposes the persistence of embedded relations within existing digital infrastructures, the latter imagines a post-institutional infrastructure of relational freedom. Together, these perspectives reveal the tension between inherited social orders and emerging protocolized forms of association–an analytical polarity and a re-enchantment of organization central to understanding how Chinese DAOs reconfigure both organization and cultural spirit. Our study proposes that SeeDAO’s evolution exemplifies a distinctive trajectory of decentralized organization–an arc from financialization to socialization to ultimately spiritualization. Initially, the community experimented with tokenomics and functional specialization typical of global DAO discourse, yet quickly encountered the limits of purely financial and instrumental models. This impasse prompted a turn toward socialization, where coordination emerged through wu-wei, a deliberate withdrawal of coercive facilitation that allows organic formations of collective patterns. As SeeDAO matured, this ethos deepened into spiritualization, guided by xiāo-yáo, a uniquely Chinese conception of freedom as dynamic balance and ease. The resulting equilibrium between yin and yang–between non-governance and intervention, emergence and structure–allowed the community to sustain coherence without hierarchy. Framed in this way, SeeDAO reveals how Chinese DAOs reorient decentralization from the pursuit of efficiency or speculation toward the cultivation of relational harmony, illustrating how blockchain technologies can evolve from financial ledgers into social and spiritual ledgers of collective life. By tracing this transformation, the paper argues that Chinese DAOs exemplify a distinctive trajectory of organizational evolution, one that privileges equilibrium, harmony, and spiritual cultivation over maximization or optimization. In doing so, they not only diverge from Western models but also expand the conceptual horizons of decentralized governance itself. Situated at the intersection of cultural-philosophical traditions and emergent blockchain practices, Chinese DAOs reframe decentralization as a moral and cosmological endeavor. This synthesis opens new paradigms for understanding communication, governance, and spirituality in networked societies. 2. Literature Review 2.1 Web 3.0 and DAO Governance The notion of Web 3.0 (or Web3) is widely understood as a shift from a read-write architecture to a read-write-own paradigm, where ownership, identity, and coordination are embedded at the protocol level via blockchains and smart contracts (Dixon, 2024). Within this environment, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have emerged as institutional innovations that allow collective coordination and governance through self-executing rules deployed on public blockchain independent of centralized intermediaries (Hassan & De Filippi, 2021). While they promise transparent, verifiable, and permissionless governance, they rely on the continuous negotiation between algorithmic enforcement and human deliberation. Scholars have proposed typologies distinguishing between on-chain, off-chain, and hybrid governance architectures. In on-chain systems, proposals, voting, and execution occur entirely through smart contracts; off-chain systems rely on human coordination and off-protocol voting mechanisms; and hybrid systems combine both, integrating algorithmic precision with contextual flexibility (Reijers et al., 2021). Legal and critical theorists frame this dynamic as the rule-of-code thesis, by embedding rules in infrastructure, blockchains redistribute discretion and authority from administrators to protocols (De Filippi & Wright, 2018). Yet this shift introduces new governance dilemmas, as code can be rigid, incapable of adapting to unforeseen contingencies, and ultimately dependent on human arbitration to maintain legitimacy. The tension between automation and adaptability thus defines much of the DAO governance debate. The earliest high-profile DAO experiment, The DAO (2016), remains a touchstone in the study of algorithmic governance. Its dramatic collapse and subsequent hard fork demonstrated that while smart contracts can automate certain functions of trust, off-chain social processes such as interpretation, deliberation, and legitimacy remain indispensable (DuPont, 2019). This dialectic between code and community set the stage for a broader understanding of DAOs not as autonomous machines but as socio-technical hybrids that balance code with community and automation with judgment. As Atzori (2015) and Reijers et al. (2021) observe, governance design in DAOs is not merely an engineering problem but a political one–an ongoing negotiation among authority, efficiency, and participation. Amid this discourse, an influential strand of research revisits Elinor Ostrom’s foundational work, Governing the Commons (1990), to rethink collective action in digital environments. Scholars such as Rozas et al. (2018), Patel et al. (2023), and Tan et al. (2023) argue that blockchains can instantiate and scale Ostrom’s design principles for managing shared resources. Tokenization and membership rules delineate community boundaries; decentralized decision-making ensures congruence between rules and local conditions; transparency provides mechanisms for monitoring; and programmable incentives enable local enforcement of norms. In this sense, DAOs can be viewed as digital commons–self-governing communities that collectively produce and maintain shared resources through algorithmic coordination (Rozas et al., 2018). This “commonist” approach departs from the hyper-individualist, libertarian ethos of early cryptocurrency movements by reframing blockchain not as a market of self-interest but as an infrastructure for cooperation (Boon-Falleur & Laizeau, 2021). Building on this perspective, recent scholarship conceptualizes DAO governance as a layered system of rules operating across social, technical, and symbolic registers. Forums and communities set agendas; signature-based signaling captures preferences; smart contracts execute outcomes; and meta-rules govern upgrades and dispute resolution (Reijers et al., 2021; Rozas et al., 2018). In this view, DAOs are not monolithic machines but living political economies, where authority, accountability, and legitimacy shift over time. Yet empirical work reveals that many DAOs still default to token-based voting, concentrating power among token holders and exposing governance to speculative financial capture (Han et al., 2023; Rong & Mao, 2025; Sharma et al., 2024). Such designs often struggle to manage identity, sybil resistance, or broader community values, the very dimensions essential for sustaining cooperative community life. An alternative theoretical development addressing these limitations is the Decentralized Society (DeSoc) paradigm proposed by Ohlhaver, Weyl, and Buterin (2022). They introduce Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), which are non-transferable, identity-bound attestations of reputation and affiliation that re-anchor governance in relational identity rather than transferable capital. By decoupling influence from marketable tokens, SBTs aim to curb speculative capture and foster pluralistic, trust-based coordination. This shift from asset governance to identity and reputation governance opens new possibilities for sustaining durable cooperation. Significantly, the authors evoke Daoist ideals by referencing Chapter 16 of the Daodejing, which describes the Dao as “the hearth and home of the ten thousand things”–a shelter and mechanism for mutual protection that embeds resilience and reciprocity within decentralized networks. This resonance with Daoist thought is particularly salient in Chinese contexts, echoing traditional understandings of governance and social harmony. Here, the Dao functions both as a moral principle and as an organizing force, inviting renewed reflection on how decentralized technologies might embody spiritual as well as economic values. By examining SeeDAO as a case of culturally embedded decentralized governance, this study extends DAO scholarship beyond its predominantly Western, technocratic framing, demonstrating how Eastern philosophical logics–particularly Daoist notions of harmony, reciprocity, and non-coercive order–inform alternative pathways for organizing digital commons in the Web3 era. 2.2 Chinese Diasporic Digital Communities The Chinese experience of digital community formation reflects a long genealogy of transnational mobility, mediated connectivity, and moral negotiation between state, market, and self. Early scholarship traced the rise of a global Chinese mediasphere (Sun, 2006; Wong, 2003), where commercial media, cultural consumption, and communal reproduction intertwined to sustain dispersed identities. With the proliferation of social platforms such as WeChat, Chinese diasporic publics became more participatory and infrastructural, allowing migrants to maintain transnational ties while navigating the politics of visibility and soft power (Sun, 2021; Sun & Yu, 2016). Within these spaces, users perform selective self-presentation across linguistic and cultural contexts, forming plural and situational identities rather than a unified sense of “Chineseness” (Lu, 2025; Shi, 2005). Building on this, scholars have examined how digital ethnic media re-territorialize belonging. Kang (2009) and Shi (2005) show that online communication enables migrants to recreate affective geographies of “home,” blurring the spatial separation between homeland and hostland. These findings resonate with Sun’s (2006) argument that the diasporic mediasphere operates as a transnational imagination, simultaneously global and locally inflected. Yet digital mediation does not guarantee coherence: internal differences of class, ideology, and regional identity fragment the imagined unity of the Chinese diaspora, limiting the emergence of collective activism (Shi, 2005). Xiang Biao’s (2011) analysis of global body shopping situates these mediated identities within broader political economies of mobility. In his ethnography of transnational IT labor, Xiang describes how corporate infrastructures commodify mobility itself, transforming circulation into both a promise of freedom and a mechanism of control. Under Web 2.0, this mobility-as-freedom was already mediated by platform infrastructures that offered connectivity while reinforcing asymmetries of access and visibility. In the transition to Web 3.0, this condition expands geographically–beyond Western-dominated circuits to South–South routes, and ontologically–from the movement of individuals to the self-organization of distributed collectives. Within this new topology, the corporation and nation-state recede as the primary organizers of mobility, and are instead replaced by decentralized infrastructures such as DAOs, non-custodial wallets, and smart contracts in place of corporate contracts to mediate and transform the conditions of belonging. Against this backdrop, the present study examines how Chinese DAOs such as SeeDAO embed the relational logics of mobility and belonging into on-chain practice, constituting a new kind of Web3 diasporic formation that imagines the community as networked and infrastructural. 2.3 From Subculture to Mediated Community Recent scholarship on online communities and subcultures has examined how digital spaces construct boundaries of identity and belonging, often reproducing center-periphery dynamics between mainstream and marginal cultures (Xiao & Stanyer, 2017). Building on this work, Web3 developments push the inquiry from online to on-chain, transforming communities into autonomous communicative entities through blockchain infrastructures. The use of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) grants these communities a new degree of subjectivity–they not only communicate but also encode their identities, governance rules, and reputational economies directly into code. In this sense, DAOs can be read as “recursive publics” (Kelty, 2013): collectives preoccupied with maintaining and redesigning the very infrastructures that enable their association. Traditional subcultures have sought recognition from dominant institutions; their existence depends on being seen by a mainstream that defines them as peripheral. In Web2, communities lacked spatial boundaries but retained strong cultural ones, sustaining a “politics of recognition” vis-à-vis mainstream culture (Xiao & Stanyer, 2017). By contrast, DAOs constitute distributed publics that do not depend on external validation. Enabled by Web3 technologies, these on-chain communities operate through mechanisms that make their boundaries procedural rather than symbolic, embedding inclusion and exclusion within governance protocols. In Web3, these boundaries become technicalized and infrastructural, reflecting what Plantin and Punathambekar (2019) describe as the infrastructural turn in digital culture–where platforms evolve into the very substrates of social life. DAOs thus reconfigure belonging as a question of participation within infrastructure rather than of identity within culture. From a communication perspective, this transformation can be understood through mediatization theory: social processes become inseparable from the logics of mediation that shape them (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). DAOs function simultaneously as media systems and mediated publics–they produce, store, and circulate symbolic value. They generate and disseminate memes, encode these memes as NFTs, and distribute fungible tokens that quantify participation and contribution. Both qualitative tokens (NFTs representing symbolic capital) and quantitative tokens (fungible or utility tokens) depend on the community’s capacity to expand its network–to attract new nodes, participants, and narrative reach. This dynamic resonates with Shifman’s (2013) typology of memes as multidimensional communicative acts that combine content, form, and stance, allowing DAOs to reproduce themselves through iterative acts of symbolic storytelling. This communicative dimension also reveals parallels with diasporic and translocal digital formations. Studies of digital nomads (Green, 2020; Holleran & Notting, 2023; Miguel et al., 2025) and refugee networks (Adams & Kotus, 2025; Alencar et al., 2025; Ratnam, 2023) demonstrate how digital media enable aspirational place-making and multiscalar homing–practices through which individuals construct belonging across dispersed geographies. Similarly, DAOs use blockchain infrastructures to sustain communities that are socially cohesive yet spatially distributed. Through on-chain rituals of participation–minting, voting, signing, and recording–they enact a form of mediated homing that binds members through shared symbolic and procedural acts (He et al., 2025). Through this lens, we understand DAOs as mediated communities that merge governance, communication, and affective attachment into a single infrastructural form. They replace the cultural politics of recognition with the procedural politics of participation, transforming boundaries from symbolic markers into operational interfaces. While prior research has examined online subcultures (Xiao & Stanyer, 2017), mediatized publics (Couldry & Hepp, 2017), and infrastructural platforms (Plantin & Punathambekar, 2019), few studies have addressed how on-chain infrastructures reconfigure the very conditions of belonging and recognition. This study fills that gap by examining DAOs as moral-infrastructural communities, showing how blockchain technologies translate subcultural self-expression into institutionalized forms of participation, memory, and value. 3. Research Design 3.1 Background: The SeeDAO Case Study This study employs a case study design, focusing on SeeDAO, one of the most visible and enduring DAOs to emerge in China’s Web3 ecosystem. Established in early 2022, SeeDAO began as a registered company that gradually de-centered into a community-led “network polis” connecting Chinese diasporic Web3 nomads in the wake of global enthusiasm for DAOs and decentralized governance. Positioned at the intersection of cultural collective and governance experiment, SeeDAO functions as a hybrid social infrastructure that connects on-chain coordination tools with off-chain community practices. SeeDAO’s early activities included tokenomics experiments, treasury management, and cross-border collaborations with Western DAOs. Yet structural exclusion from global financial circuits and recurring challenges in sustaining finance-oriented models compelled SeeDAO to pivot toward community-centered activities, including knowledge production, cultural events, and social gatherings. Beyond liquid assets, the group defines social relations, public assets, organizational rules, and historical memory as the community’s most valuable forms of capital that shape a self-governing network built on collective creation and shared resources. Daoist Philosophy as Organizational Thought SeeDAO’s white paper, “Digital Polis” (Tang et al., 2022), articulates Daoist thought into a triadic grammar of gòng-zài (co-presence), yǒng-xiàn (emergence), and xiāo-yáo (wandering), as the basis of what constitutes a “good life” on-chain. Co-presence describes the polis as a living web of human connections where meaning arises through “being-with-other.” Emergence refers to the unfolding of each individual’s inner Dào (道) through acts (zuò 做) and works (zuò-pǐn 作品) recorded in the collective ledger. Wandering signifies the highest state of freedom, one that corresponds not to the liberal notions of “freedom” as individual rights or unbounded choice, but rather a cultivated ease within social life, where individuals navigate constraints and possibilities without falling into rigidity or chaos. The group’s logo further visualizes the Daoist worldview by adopting a seed-like yīn-yáng sphere encircled by orbital rings that signify balance, regeneration, and continual becoming. Governance Architecture, Mutualizing Resources and Recognition Organizationally, SeeDAO codifies a layered system that blends bottom-up emergence with light top-down coordination, described in its Meta Protocol (SeeDAO, 2022) as a combination of self-organization and hierarchical flow-layered governance, organic mobility, and public transparency (p.2). Membership begins with the creation of an on-chain wallet and a small transaction to activate participation; newcomers can earn non-transferable contribution points ($SCR) through community activities, which may be converted into a “Seed NFT”–a citizenship badge and cultural symbol that grants voting rights in the Node Consensus Assembly and eligibility to propose projects. Complementing this feature are three additional token instruments that together form SeeDAO’s socio-economic infrastructure: (1) WANG, a non-transferable reputation point system that records members’ historical contributions and determines governance weight; (2) Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), which represent members’ skills, works, and social identities across projects, and are anchored to the SeeDAO Naming Service (SNS), the protocol that unifies these credentials under a unique on-chain identity; and (3) the $SEE token, originally conceived as the polis’s internal currency to sustain commons-based production. In practice, however, SeeDAO has deprioritized financial tokenization, recently voting to suspend $SEE’s issuance and return early investment funds from its treasury (Baiyu, 2025) in order to reorient the community toward public-interest projects and offline engagements such as rural digital-nomad bases and urban cultural hubs. Within this governance structure, the “Node Consensus Assembly” serves as the highest decision-making body, convening quarterly under a “one-node-one-vote” principle to approve budgets and major proposals. The “City Hall” functions as the day-to-day governance organ, rotating every three months to handle operations, communications, and finances through an Assembly-approved multisignature sub-treasury. The “Strategic Incubator” operates under expert governance, focusing on infrastructure development and “making blood”–ensuring economic sustainability for the commons. Complementing these are a constellation of guilds and projects, each enjoying self-determination within the parameters of governance as defined by the Meta Protocol in a polycentric ecology. As of mid-2025, there are 763 SeeDAO members, 475 Seed members, 13 governance nodes, and 357 proposals. Treasury and incentive systems are designed to embed reciprocity. The City Hall treasury is replenished each quarter following Assembly approval, and all inflows and outflows remain transparent to members. This mechanism effectively converts participation and stewardship into value, using the blockchain to keep a record of the reputation, trust, and contribution that flow through the network. As articulated in SeeDAO’s White Paper, “Public assets, accumulated relationships, and shared memory are the polis’s true wealth” (Tang et al., 2022). 3.3 Research Methods This research employs an ethnographic case study approach, combining semi-structured interviews with participant observation. Eleven in-depth interviews were conducted with core members of SeeDAO. Interviews lasted approximately 60 minutes each and were conducted either in person or via Tencent Meeting. All interviews were conducted in Chinese. Direct quotes used in this article were translated by the authors into English. The semi-structured format allowed for consistency across key themes–DAO culture and philosophy, governance practices, personal motivations, and challenges and reflections–while providing flexibility to follow emergent lines of inquiry. All interviews were recorded with participants’ consent and subsequently transcribed. In addition to interviews, the authors participated in SeeDAO’s offline activities between 2022 to 2025, including the Digital Nomad Week held in Pingnan, Fujian Province, in July 2025, to gain first-hand insight into the rhythms of organizational life and the embodied practices through which Daoist concepts such as wú-wéi and xiāo-yáo were enacted. Field notes and reflexive memos were compiled to capture events, interactions, and interpretive reflections, forming a key part of the qualitative dataset. All interview transcripts and field notes were analyzed using qualitative coding techniques (Charmaz, 2014). A codebook was developed to capture three levels of analysis: (1) organizational form (on-chain/off-chain governance, role of identity tokens, emergent activities); (2) cultural and philosophical references (mentions of wú-wéi, xiāo-yáo, yīn-yáng); and (3) member positionality (founders vs. mid-level coordinators vs. newcomers). The anonymized index of interviewees is summarized in Table 1. While pseudonyms are used for confidentiality, we retain the role, onboarding year, and active status to contextualize responses. Data storage complied with institutional ethics guidelines, and participants could withdraw at any stage. The dual positionality of the researcher as both observer and occasional participant was acknowledged and critically reflected upon during analysis. Table 1. Index of Interviewees. Onboarding Whether Still Active Index Role Year (as of July 2025) Interviewee 1 Co-Founder 2022 Yes Interviewee 2 Co-Founder 2022 Yes Interviewee 3 Engineer 2023 Yes Interviewee 4 Media 2022 Yes Interviewee 5 Media 2022 Yes Interviewee 6 Media 2023 Yes Interviewee 7 Coordinator 2024 Yes Interviewee 8 Media 2022 Yes Interviewee 9 Media 2022 No Interviewee 10 Newcomer 2025 Yes Interviewee 11 Coordinator 2023 No 4. Findings 4.1 Eastern Philosophy for Decentralized Worlds Chinese DAOs such as SeeDAO embed Daoist philosophical logics not as decorative metaphors but as operational principles for collective coordination. While Western DAOs often conceptualize decentralization through technical architectures such as code-based autonomy, cryptographic trust, or token-mediated governance, Chinese DAOs tend to emphasize moral, relational, and cosmological dimensions of organization. In SeeDAO, Daoist cosmology provides both a language for reflection and a grammar for action, shaping how participants imagine and enact decentralization as an ethical and spiritual process. Three Daoist ideas, wú-wéi (non-action), xiāo-yáo (carefree wandering), and yīn-yáng (dynamic balance), are especially salient.

summarized in Table 1. While pseudonyms are used for confidentiality, we retain the role, onboarding year, and active status to contextualize responses. Data storage complied with institutional ethics guidelines, and participants could withdraw at any stage. The dual positionality of the researcher as both observer and occasional participant was acknowledged and critically reflected upon during analysis. Table 1. Index of Interviewees. Onboarding Whether Still Active Index Role Year (as of July 2025) Interviewee 1 Co-Founder 2022 Yes Interviewee 2 Co-Founder 2022 Yes Interviewee 3 Engineer 2023 Yes Interviewee 4 Media 2022 Yes Interviewee 5 Media 2022 Yes Interviewee 6 Media 2023 Yes Interviewee 7 Coordinator 2024 Yes Interviewee 8 Media 2022 Yes Interviewee 9 Media 2022 No Interviewee 10 Newcomer 2025 Yes Interviewee 11 Coordinator 2023 No 4. Findings 4.1 Eastern Philosophy for Decentralized Worlds Chinese DAOs such as SeeDAO embed Daoist philosophical logics not as decorative metaphors but as operational principles for collective coordination. While Western DAOs often conceptualize decentralization through technical architectures such as code-based autonomy, cryptographic trust, or token-mediated governance, Chinese DAOs tend to emphasize moral, relational, and cosmological dimensions of organization. In SeeDAO, Daoist cosmology provides both a language for reflection and a grammar for action, shaping how participants imagine and enact decentralization as an ethical and spiritual process. Three Daoist ideas, wú-wéi (non-action), xiāo-yáo (carefree wandering), and yīn-yáng (dynamic balance), are especially salient. Wú-wéi has long been understood not as passivity but as an attuned mode of governance in which rulers and communities act in harmony with emergent processes rather than through coercive control (Ames & Hall, 2010; Chan, 2008; Slingerland, 2003). In organizational terms, it represents a principle of indirect governance that creates minimal yet enabling structures that allow order to arise spontaneously (Puett, 2004). Within SeeDAO, this logic is made operational through rotating social procedures, seasonal leadership transitions, and the founders’ withdrawal from managerial control. Leadership becomes facilitation rather than command, embodying the Daoist notion that “the usefulness of a vessel lies in its emptiness” (Daodejing, ch. 11). This “generative emptiness” transforms governance into an open field of emergence, one where action flows from attunement rather than assertion. Xiāo-yáo, often translated as “carefree wandering,” complements wú-wéi by extending the philosophy of non-imposition into the social and spiritual realm. In Zhuangzi, xiāo-yáo describes a form of liberated being that navigates constraint with effortless adaptability (Zhuangzi & Ziporyn, 2020). It is not freedom from relation, as in the Western liberal tradition that privileges autonomy and the absence of constraint (Berlin, 1969), but freedom through relation–a cultivated ease within the flux of social life, where individuality is realized through attunement rather than separation. Within SeeDAO, xiāo-yáo manifests as a collective ethos rather than an individual state: members move fluidly between roles and projects, balancing initiative with repose. As one interviewee described, the goal is “to act without being bound by action” (Interviewee 1, 2025). This orientation transforms participation from obligation into play, suggesting that decentralized coordination may rely less on contract than on cultivated disposition. Finally, yīn–yáng provides the cosmological backdrop against which wú-wéi and xiāo-yáo intertwine. Rather than opposing principles, yīn (receptivity, yielding) and yáng (activity, assertion) constitute a rhythm of alternation through which harmony arises. In SeeDAO’s governance, decision-making oscillates between yǒu-wéi 有为 (purposeful action) and wú-wéi 无为 (non-action), between mechanism and emotion, rule and improvisation. This oscillation is not seen as dysfunction but as vital rhythm–the “organismic balance” that Daoist thinkers identify as the basis of social harmony (Ivanhoe, 2000). By embracing yīn–yáng complementarity, SeeDAO reframes decentralization not as the absence of a center but as the presence of balance. Through these philosophical translations, SeeDAO redefines decentralization as a moral and spiritual practice of attunement. Daoism thus provides a cultural-philosophical infrastructure that resonates with blockchain’s technical ethos of distributed order yet infuses it with a sensibility of relational harmony. In this light, SeeDAO’s experiments extend the genealogy of Chinese thought into Web3, translating Dào as both the “Way” and “Protocol”: a dynamic path where governance, technology, and spirituality converge in the making of a digital polis. At the same time, Dào (道) also evokes Dǎo (岛)–the “island”–an enclosed yet porous form that mirrors the Daodejing’s political ideal of the small state with few people (xiaoguó guǎmín 小国寡民; Daodejing, ch. 80). Far from isolationism, this image represents a scale of governance attuned to self-sufficiency, intimacy, and balance–an order sustained by proximity rather than power and coercion. SeeDAO’s “digital polis” resonates with this morphology. Like the Daoist island-state, it experiments with bounded openness–small in scale yet linked through shared protocols, forming an archipelago of decentralized worlds rather than a single global network state. 4.2 Value and Instrumental Rationality: Tension and Balance Another central finding from the SeeDAO case study concerns the persistent tension between value rationality and instrumental rationality–that is, between the pursuit of spiritual or ethical ideals and the pragmatic need for efficiency, rules, mechanisms, and measurable outcomes. Drawing on Max Weber’s (1978) distinction between wertrationalität (action guided by conviction) and zweckrationalität (action guided by efficiency), this dialectic captures how SeeDAO members continuously negotiate meaning and structure within a decentralized environment. The community’s evolution reveals that the balance between these rationalities is neither linear nor fixed but oscillates–much like the Daoist interplay of yin and yang–between spontaneity and governance, conviction and calculation. The primacy of value rationality is most pronounced among founders and newcomers, the visionaries who initiated SeeDAO and those drawn to its ideals. Both groups emphasize symbolism, spirituality, and human connection over procedural formalism. One of the founders reflected that SeeDAO’s inception was a response to the atomization of contemporary life, particularly under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic: “We are facing problems of individualization–divorce, unemployment, the lack of friendship. We want to bring people together” (Interviewee 1, 2025). This notion of co-presence expresses an ethical impulse to rebuild collectivity through shared being and mutual recognition that stands as a counter-movement against alienation in a digital modernity. Yet translating this spiritual orientation into an organizational form required an alternative mode of governance, one that could sustain collectivity without reproducing hierarchy. In this context, SeeDAO’s founders turned to the Daoist principle of wú-wéi (non-coercive or “effortless” action) as an orientation that allows order to emerge organically from below rather than being imposed from above (Ames & Hall, 2010; Liu, 2015). Reflecting on the genesis of SeeDAO, Interviewee 1 (2025) remarked, “We both dislike companies; we are bad managers. We hope people will just do things on their own.” For Interviewee 1, SeeDAO should not be administered but allowed to happen–a contemporary enactment of wú-wéi, where organization emerges through improvisation and responsiveness to the moment, echoing Karl Weick’s (1998) notion of emergent organizing. By contrast, Interviewee 2, the other co-founder, embodied a more instrumental rationality–one grounded in procedural order and systemic coherence. Following early frustrations with Western investors, the team redirected its attention inward. “Meta-rules are important,” recalled Interviewee 2 (2025), ” I wasn’t upset that people disagreed with me, but that they didn’t respect the original rule.” This emphasis crystallizes a shift from charisma to codification: the belief that legitimacy should derive from shared procedural norms rather than personal authority, culminating in the drafting of the Meta Protocol, which provided a structural counterpoint to the spontaneous Daoist ethos articulated in the White Paper. While the White Paper privileged purpose and moral direction, as noted by Interviewee 1 (2025) in a remark: “We should go straight toward the goal, the good life, not spend all day studying tools,” the Meta Protocol insisted on procedural integrity and rule-based legitimacy. Together, these two documents–each led by one of the founders–materialize SeeDAO’s constitutive dialectic between value and instrumental rationalities, and between conviction and coordination. In essence, they form the yīn-yáng of SeeDAO’s founding logic: wú-wéi (non-action) and yǒu-wéi (purposeful action) held in dynamic and productive tension. As SeeDAO matured, mid-level coordinators emerged as stewards of institutional continuity, effectively functioning as the enactors of instrumental rationality and custodians of procedural commitment. Members such as Interviewee 7, who is part of the “Town Hall Trio,” described governance as sustained through fidelity to rules even during the founders’ absence in 2023: “For about a year, the founders weren’t active. We kept the community running through meta-rules. Of course, this required a lot of communication. Voting mattered, but it couldn’t replace earlier dialogue” (Interviewee 7, 2025). This reflection exemplifies what Ostrom (1990) termed nested rule systems–procedures maintained through deliberation and mutual trust rather than hierarchy. Even dissent served a communicative function: “If I knew a proposal would pass, I sometimes voted no. A two-to-one result let it pass but signaled concern” (Interviewee 7, 2025). Similarly, Interviewee 8, active in the Translation Guild, framed elections as mechanisms of empowerment: “It was unbelievable that someone as young as myself could represent such a well-known DAO. That kind of empowerment is impossible in a company.” For these coordinators, rules were not antithetical to equality but its very medium–institutionalizing fairness and continuity in lieu of personal authority or informal ties. Between these poles of spontaneity and structure, another group emerged: the engineers and builders who maintained SeeDAO’s technical backbone. Occupying a liminal position between vision and mechanism, they approached governance less as a matter of compliance than as a craft of translating moral ideals into functional systems. Interviewee 3, an engineer, articulated a mediating stance between vision and regulation. Having left the corporate world, he valued SeeDAO’s rén qíng wèi 人情味 (human warmth): “I came from the corporate system, so I don’t want DAOs to return to that harsh regime. I chose SeeDAO because there’s humanity here” (Interviewee 3, 2025). When asked whether spirit or rules mattered more, he replied: “The White Paper is more important. Technology isn’t yet advanced enough for rules alone to work. Consensus still needs the human element.” For members like Interviewee 3, the White Paper functions as soft governance–a symbolic charter articulating shared spirit–whereas Interviewee 2’s meta-protocol embodies hard governance. Together they express the Daoist principle that form and emptiness co-generate order (Ames & Hall, 2010). This process of translating ideals into systems extended beyond the technical core, evolving further into the translation of those systems into lived and diverse forms of sociality among SeeDAO’s broader circle of practitioners and peripheral participants. Reflecting on the pragmatic adaptation of Daoist ideals in collective life, Interviewee 5, a community organizer, valued yǒng-xiàn (emergence) but considered xiāo-yáo (carefree balance) as “too idealistic” (2025). Interviewee 4, who initially joined for the promise of token gains, shifted toward interpersonal connection after the 2023 market decline: “In state-owned enterprises, we had endless ideological meetings. Here everyone’s opinion matters; you feel you’re actually creating something together.” Such testimonies mark SeeDAO’s transition from financial to social valuation, echoing broader movements from tokenized speculation toward the cultivation of moral community (Reijers & Coeckelbergh, 2018). Yet not all participants sustained this ethos. Interviewee 9 (2025) critiqued SeeDAO’s vagueness–“it never had a clear positioning,” –though still felt a sense of belonging when his first proposal passed. Another member, Interviewee 11, eventually departed, disillusioned by SeeDAO’s wavering sense of functional direction as she clarified her own trajectory: “SeeDAO keeps wavering about its identity… I realized what I wanted–to build an AI start-up–so I left” (2025). In contrast, newcomers like Interviewee 10, who went by the pseudonym “Ryan,” found meaning in symbolic participation: “Here everyone calls me by my SeeDAO name ‘Ryan.’ The NFT image was attractive–if tasks could earn it, I’d definitely participate” (2025). Encountered during the Pingnan gathering, his comment reflects a temporary escape from the reality of everyday pressures, with his attachment to a digital name and image exemplifying xiāo-yáo at the individual level–a playful freedom rooted in symbolic belonging rather than material gain. Across these narratives, SeeDAO emerges as a site of continual negotiation between spiritual aspiration and procedural discipline. Founders and newcomers enact value rationality through moral and affective engagement; coordinators institutionalize instrumental rationality through mechanisms of rule and deliberation; those in between reconcile the two by re-infusing procedural order with moral meaning. This interplay mirrors the Daoist yīn-yáng dynamic: when value dominates, the organization drifts into abstraction; when mechanism prevails, it hardens into bureaucracy. Sustainability lies somewhere in the rhythmic oscillation between the two. Seen through this lens, wú-wéi operates as a mode of governance that privileges emergence, while yǒu-wéi ensures stability. The White Paper and Meta Protocol thus function as complementary poles–vision and infrastructure–whose interaction maintains organizational equilibrium. In practice, xiāo-yáo serves not as transcendence but as a mediating state between passion and structure, allowing participants to inhabit SeeDAO’s contradictions with ease and creative freedom. 4.3 Beyond Money: From Financial Ledger to Social Ledger The third major finding concerns the transformation of blockchain’s function in SeeDAO from a financial ledger to a social ledger. This shift represents not merely a change in technological application but a deeper revaluation of what constitutes value, legitimacy, and belonging. In its early phase, SeeDAO sought to operate as a functional, investment-oriented DAO aligned with Western models of token-based governance. Its treasury management, fundraising attempts, and financial proposals reflected a belief that the blockchain’s purpose was to ensure transparent accounting and efficient capital allocation. However, exclusion from Western financial infrastructures and internal disillusionment with speculation precipitated a critical pivot. As one founder noted, “We realized our goal wasn’t to make money but to build relationships” (Interviewee 1, 2025). This turning point initiated a re-symbolization of the ledger: rather than merely recording monetary transactions, the blockchain became a medium for inscribing social participation, tracking contributions, identities, and reputations through mechanisms such as SNS identity IDs and NFT-based reputation points. As Interviewee 10 (2025) recalled, “I remember the sense of exhilaration I felt when I received my on-chain ID; this is my passport into the ‘New World.’ I own this identity, and no one can take it away from me. My on-chain record is the proof that I exist here.” For him, blockchain inscription was not about ownership but presence, and the way to be seen and remembered in a distributed community. Similarly, Interviewees 9 and 2 (2025) described their wallet addresses, SNS names, and NFT badges as “social mirrors” reflecting their evolving identities within the DAO. The ledger, once a technical substrate for value exchange, became a mnemonic and relational archive–a living social memory where capital is transmuted into culture and transactions into traces of care. The movement from financialization to socialization corresponds to a yīn-yáng inversion: the yáng (the visible, quantifiable, financial) gives way to the yīn (the invisible, relational, affective). Yet, in Daoist understanding, these poles are interdependent: the ledger remains technical but now carries symbolic and ethical weight. This reconfiguration demonstrates how SeeDAO reinterprets blockchain not as an engine of extraction but as a vessel for relational balance. This transition also reshapes the meaning of community. In SeeDAO, community is not defined by ownership or capital stake but by shared participation and symbolic exchange. Members accrue reputation through contributing content, organizing events, or mentoring others. Tokens and NFTs operate as signs of relational depth rather than speculative assets. As several interviewees emphasized, the true value of SeeDAO lies in “doing things together,” not in “liquid returns” (Interviewees 1, 2, and 10, 2025). This relational interpretation of tokens echoes Marcel Mauss’s (1990) notion of the gift as a medium of social bonding rather than economic transaction. Like the potlatch or gift exchange, SeeDAO’s symbolic economy binds members through acts of recognition and reciprocity that transform exchange into relation. Similarly, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (2011) suggests that value is not intrinsic but socially constituted through meaning-making practices–a perspective that illuminates how blockchain inscription here functions as a medium of social valuation, where contribution rather than capital accumulation defines worth. In this sense, SeeDAO repositions value from the economic to the ethical register, reconstituting blockchain as an instrument of social trust. This reconfiguration resonates with recent arguments in digital sociology that platforms are evolving into “infrastructures of recognition” (Schulz, 2023) and “archives of presence” (Couldry & Hepp, 2017), where data traces become the medium through which social life is organized and validated. In SeeDAO, blockchain inscription thus serves not only to verify transactions but to instantiate social being–to render participation durable, accountable, and symbolically meaningful within a distributed moral order. The DAO thus becomes what Émile Durkheim (1964) might call a “moral community,” a social group unified and sustained by shared beliefs, rituals of participation, and mutual recognition rather than by contract or coercion. Its governance becomes performative: voting, signing, and minting are not merely administrative acts but rituals of belonging, marking participation in a shared moral economy. Ultimately, the metamorphosis from financial to social ledger represents SeeDAO’s spiritualization of technology. By embedding Daoist notions of harmony and reciprocity into digital infrastructures, the community transforms blockchain from a mechanism of scarcity into an ecology of meaning. In so doing, SeeDAO exemplifies how decentralized technologies, when grounded in cultural-philosophical traditions, can generate new ontologies of value, where economy, ethics, and spirituality interweave. 5. Discussion and Conclusion: DAO and Community Life This study provides one of the first ethnographic analyses of DAO governance in a Chinese context, examining how Daoist philosophy is not merely referenced symbolically but selectively operationalized as a framework for collective coordination. Empirically, it traces SeeDAO’s evolution from financialization to socialization and, aspirationally, to spiritualization, revealing how each phase reconfigures the meanings of participation, freedom, and value. Theoretically, it extends DAO and commons governance scholarship by introducing an Eastern moral-cosmological lens–particularly the ideas of wú-wéi, xiāo-yáo, and yīn-yáng–to conceptualize decentralization as a relational ethics of balance rather than a purely technical problem of control. Conceptually, it proposes relational governance, in which cooperation is sustained through minimal structure, restrained authority, and ritualized recognition embedded within technological infrastructures, while also acknowledging the fragility of such balance under conditions of uneven commitment and distributed responsibility. This Daoist reconfiguration reframes decentralization as an ongoing practice of attunement rather than a quest for autonomy. Within SeeDAO, leadership often takes the form of facilitation rather than control, and governance as rhythm rather than rule. The interplay of yīn-yáng–between activity and receptivity, rule and improvisation, structure and openness–offers an aspirational moral logic for collective life. Yet this ethos is unevenly embodied. The capacity to act with wú-wéi or xiāo-yáo depends on positionality, time investment, and emotional labor; for some, non-coercive governance enables creativity, while for others it generates ambiguity, fatigue, or diffuse accountability. Oscillation between order and spontaneity thus remains a field of tension rather than stable harmony–a continual negotiation between ideals of fluidity and the pragmatic need for coordination. SeeDAO’s experience underscores both the promise and precarity of relational governance: balance here is not equilibrium achieved, but equilibrium perpetually pursued. A further dimension of SeeDAO’s trajectory is its attempt to transform the blockchain from a financial ledger into a social ledger. By prioritizing non-transferable identifiers, reputation points, and Soulbound Tokens, the community sought to recast the ledger as a medium of memory and recognition rather than accumulation. On-chain inscription documents not only transactions but also the social traces of collaboration and care. Technology becomes an infrastructure of belonging, translating Daoist notions of reciprocity into the procedural language of blockchain. Participation is both symbolic and affective: to mint, vote, or sign is to make one’s presence visible and to affirm a shared moral order, even as these rituals may wane when enthusiasm or clarity fades. By interpreting blockchain as a moral infrastructure, SeeDAO invites an alternative to the dominant narratives of market rationality or technical optimization. Its model demonstrates how DAOs have the potential to function as infrastructures of care, where coordination and reputation serve not purely extractive ends but the cultivation of ethical community–albeit one continually negotiating sustainability, inclusion, and coherence. This finding extends Ostrom’s (1990) insights on commons governance, showing that collective action principles can be culturally refracted: boundaries, monitoring, and sanctions persist, but are mediated through affective trust, ritualized participation, and moral reciprocity. For scholars and designers, SeeDAO’s case highlights the productive tensions between aspiration and realization, suggesting that decentralized governance is an experimental process of ethical attunement. Ultimately, SeeDAO’s Daoist orientation prompts a reconsideration of what it means to “govern” in a decentralized world. 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