DAO Sustainability and Citizen Data Ownership: A Token-Driven Framework

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and citizen-controlled data exchange represent two areas where blockchain technology promises to deliver transparent governance and individual sovereignty. In practice, however, both face persistent challenges: DAOs suffer from low voter turnout and concentrated decision-making power, while citizen data platforms struggle to balance regulatory compliance with practical performance. This thesis investigates these challenges through a unified lens, treating DAO governance and energy data ownership as instances of the same architectural problem: how to anchor trust on a public ledger while keeping data- intensive operations off-chain. The first part of the thesis focuses on DAO sustainability. An empirical analysis of 50 DAOs across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and BNB Chain examines 6,930 proposals and 317,317 unique voter addresses. The results show a median participation rate of 4.16% and confirm that a small number of addresses frequently dominate proposal creation and voting outcomes. To address these deficits, this work develops a four-dimensional Key Performance Indicator (KPI) framework measuring participation, decentralisation, financial health, and deci- sional efficiency. A game-theoretic incentive model is then proposed, combining token rewards for voting, penal- ties for abstention, and reputation-based eligibility requirements. Simulations calibrated on an eight-member energy cooperative show that these mechanisms can raise expected turnout from 40% to 80% over a ten-year pe- riod without depleting the treasury. The KPIs and incentive model are implemented in a governance dashboard designed for continuous use; new DAOs can be added and metrics update automatically as on-chain activity occurs. The second part addresses citizen energy data ownership. A marketplace built on Quorum tokenises energy datasets as ERC-721 assets and issues ERC-20 licences for data access. The system integrates GAIA-X and IDSA compliance mechanisms and achieves mean transaction latencies under ten seconds on a five-node permissioned network. Extending this infrastructure, a digital-twin pipeline commits Merkle roots of household sensor data to the ledger, enabling third parties to verify the provenance of analytics outputs without accessing raw measure- ments. The thesis makes two main contributions: first, a validated methodology for measuring and improving DAO sustainability, comprising a KPI framework, an incentive model, and an operational dashboard; second, a com- pliant tokenisation architecture for citizen-controlled energy data with verifiable provenance. Both contributions share three design principles: separation of coordination logic from data processing, progressive decentralisation through reputation, and hybrid on-chain/off-chain architectures that balance transparency with privacy. These principles offer a foundation for building accountable, citizen-centred services in smart societies.