Sustainability by Design in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: An Empirical Review of Governance, Innovation, and Institutional Design
For scholars and policymakers, it provides evidence that decentralized governance can embed sustainability into technical standards, but the comparison is incremental and lacks quantitative performance metrics.
This study compares ERC-8004 and Google A2A standards for agent interoperability, finding that DAO-governed ERC-8004 embeds sustainability into organizational design, while consortium-governed A2A does not. The analysis uses LLM-powered discourse analysis to reveal socio-technical power structures.
Recent innovation theories on economics remain largely grounded in assumptions of hierarchical firms and closed organizational boundaries, offering limited insight into how innovation unfolds within decentralized, digitally native organizations. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent an emerging form of innovation ecosystem characterized by blockchain-based transparency, open participation, and token-driven governance, in which sustainability can be embedded directly into organizational design. This study compares two standards, ERC-8004 and Google A2A, who address the same agent interoperability question, while the former is governed by DAO and the latter by corporation consortium. They are examined through an LLM-powered comparative pipeline for large-scale governance discourse analysis, integrating automated annotation, neural topic modeling, and multi-layer network analysis to study socio-technical power structures. The study provides evidence-based insights for scholars, policymakers, and designers seeking to align innovation, technological governance, and sustainability in future organizational forms.