This paper explores the idea that Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are a new type of data trust for decentralised governance of data.

The key contributions of this paper are:

• An investigation of how the concept of data trusts applies to DAOs.
• An examination of if and how DAOs as data trusts may provide greater accountability and recourse over data stewardship for participants through software-encoded governance, rather than traditional legal recourse.
• An exploration of examples and possibilities of DAOs as data trusts emerging in decentralised blockchain communities.