Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University conducted a study on how tokenization affects decentralization in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). The study found that the challenges to autonomy are related to the reasons individual users have for participating. As a DAO grows, participants may view DAO tokens as investments, which can divert subsidies away from users and harm their participation. Tokenization shifts ownership from initial equity holders to a platform's users, but the tradeoff is that there's no single entity that can subsidize network participation, leaving the gates open for investors to treat purpose-driven DAOs like traditional stocks.