Current Position & Biography
Trebor Scholz is an associate professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York and a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. His research concerns cooperative ownership and governance in the digital economy. Harvard's profile, updated in October 2026, identifies him as the founder of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium in 2018 and the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy in 2019.
Scholz's work on platform cooperativism examines digital services owned and governed by participants rather than solely by outside investors. His books include Uberworked and Underpaid and Own This! That broader institutional research provides the setting for his engagement with blockchain and decentralized autonomous organizations; platform cooperatives are not inherently blockchain projects.
Notable Contributions
Scholz has participated directly in discussions about applying cooperative principles to blockchain governance. The Platform Cooperativism Consortium listed him as a speaker for its November 2021 session on autonomous organizations and cooperatives. The session's stated questions included how cooperative principles might be incorporated into smart contracts and on-chain governance, how mission drift could be addressed, and how audiences could distinguish credible cooperative structures from misleading claims.
In November 2022, he guided the Consortium's session Can Coops Solve DAO's Governance Issues? The program framed cooperative experience as a source of lessons for DAO designers, including the institutional challenges that can arise as organizations develop. This establishes a concrete convening role in the conversation, not authorship of every speaker's position or proof that a given DAO has adopted those lessons.
His April 2025 article Can Blockchain Bridge the Trust Gap in SEWA's Healthcare Network? examined an announced collaboration involving the SEWA Federation and Algorand Foundation. He discussed the proposed use of digital health records in existing community-service infrastructure and asked whether blockchain tools could address practical documentation barriers faced by informal workers.
The article takes a cautiously optimistic position, emphasizing institutional context and practical utility over speculative narratives. It is evidence of Scholz's analysis of a blockchain use case, not a claim that he built the system or independently demonstrated its security, adoption or health outcomes. Any assessment of the initiative's subsequent deployment requires current evidence from the organizations involved.
Why Katharos Is Following Them
Scholz brings experience with cooperative ownership to questions about DAOs and on-chain institutions. His contribution is relevant when a project calls itself community-owned: who participates, who holds decision-making power, and what protects its purpose over time? His public work encourages comparisons between blockchain governance experiments and longer-established organizational forms.
Areas to Follow
Further research and convenings linking cooperative governance with DAOs. Practical criteria for assessing community ownership beyond token distribution. Evidence about blockchain applications developed with worker and cooperative organizations. The relationship between legal structures, organizational accountability and technical governance rules.
Reporting Scope
Coverage should distinguish dated conference participation, Scholz's own commentary and the verified outcomes of projects he discusses. His cooperative work is broader than crypto, and inclusion does not imply protocol leadership or endorsement of a financial product. Claims about health-data security, public benefits or investment performance need separate, current verification.
Katharos Category
Community, Media & Education
Photo Credit
jeanbaptisteparis, “Trebor Scholz,” source-recorded May 6, 2010. CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped and resized; adaptation shared under CC BY-SA 2.0. Photograph: Source 6; license: Source 7.