Presentation — Maël Rolland x Samouraï Coop

Mael Roland
3 days ago
5 min read

Independent Researcher en résidence at Samouraï Governance Research Lab

Introduction

This year, in 2025, Samouraï Coop is launching the Samouraï Governance Research Lab: an embedded research space dedicated to exploring cooperative, decentralized, and commons-oriented organizational models. It is within this context that I am pleased to join the team as a researcher-in-residence.

I am Maël Rolland, a socio-economist with a Ph.D. in Economics and Social Sciences from EHESS, specializing in the study of cryptocurrencies, their crises, and their governance models—particularly Bitcoin and Ethereum.

My mission at the Lab is to extend my works on decentralized infrastructures and their community governance models, putting them to the service of a simple goal: to equip those who are building more just, open, and robust organizations on a daily basis.

1 — Who I Am: Background and Expertise

My “Academic Pedigree”

My research has been structured around three axes:

The political dimensions of cryptocurrencies—the material conditions, but also the imaginaries—and the way crypto communities project monetary ideals into technical systems.
The socio-technical infrastructures—protocols, platforms, mediations, maintenance tools—that make these community currencies into money, but also challenge them as such.
The governance practices—often discreet, diffuse, sometimes noisy, and ultimately always polycentric—that emerge in these infrastructures despite a liberal-technicist imaginary that claims there is “no governance, only code.”

In my thesis, "Beyond the Codes: The Discreet and Polycentric Governance and Infrastructure of Bitcoin and Ethereum Unveiled by Their Crises" (EHESS, 2024), I studied Bitcoin and Ethereum as living socio-technical infrastructures, whose monetary properties evolve with the social, technical, and organizational arrangements that compose them. I show how their crises—whether loud, like the 2016 DAO Fork, or quieter, like Bitcoin's CVE-2018 vulnerability—reveal a distributed division of labor, built on trust, intermediation, coordination, and an immense amount of invisible maintenance and repair around shared protocol code. Crisis governance, taken as an object of study, thus functions as a true institutional laboratory: moments where communities negotiate not only the desirable characteristics of their currency but also their values, norms, and the legitimacy of their collective choices.

My work is situated at the intersection of institutional monetary theory and science and technology studies (STS). I do not approach cryptocurrencies as simple technical or financial objects, but as infrastructures involving users, developers, and platforms—all of whom shape their governance. I analyze forms of distributed, transnational, and polycentric monetary sovereignty that are exercised through code, community norms, social arrangements, and coordination, rather than through a single center of decision-making.

Thus, I conceive of cryptocurrencies as real currencies—parallel and community-based forms—which leads me to a broader observation: the monetary fragmentations we see today in crypto networks, as well as on a global scale, are neither new nor exceptional. What is unprecedented are the ways in which this fragmentation is now institutionalized through protocol governance and the scaling of distributed architectures.

Through this work, I seek to shed light on a question that also runs through Samouraï Coop: how can we preserve collective autonomy, openness, and agency in a world of fragmented yet interdependent networks?

My “Crypto Credentials”

Beyond my academic work, I have also been a long-time practitioner in the crypto ecosystem: a holder of BTC, ETH, shitcoins, and NFTs since 2015; a Rare Pepe artist in 2016 (created 3 cards); DegenSCORE: leaderboard ~600 / 29,917...

This dual role—researcher and practitioner—allows me to approach governance issues with a deep understanding of the technical, economic, and social stakes that run through these ecosystems.

2 — What I'm Here to Do at the Samouraï Governance Research Lab

My role at the Lab is to study, analyze, and document the governance models specific to:

Cooperatives (SCOP, SCIC, CAE),
DAOs and Web3 protocols,
And commons-oriented collectives (digital commons, mutualized models, open infrastructures).

At EHESS, I conducted a long-term ethnographic study of crises—forks, vulnerabilities, conflicts—to understand how non-state communities make collective decisions in distributed environments. It is this type of method that I will mobilize—and make explicit—for my work within Samouraï Coop.

In practical terms, I will work based on:

Interviews with members, founders, and associates,
Observations of meetings, votes, arbitrations, and mediations,
Analysis of internal and external documents (statutes, contracts, technical governance, rights allocation),
Data extraction and visualization, when it illuminates collective dynamics (participation, GitHub activity, decision flows, role distribution).

My goal is to highlight what works, what is being explored, and what is being passed on, and to produce reusable, open, and auditable resources.

3 — My Approach: Open and Collaborative Research

In keeping with the Samouraï spirit—learning by building, formalizing by experimenting—my methodology is resolutely:

Qualitative and Situated

I start from real practices, not from a priori models. The core of the work relies on the detailed description of action situations, notably using Elinor Ostrom's tools to analyze rules, roles, and bundles of rights. I aim to offer simple and robust conceptual bridges that allow the worlds of cooperatives, Web3, and the commons to engage in dialogue.

Interdisciplinary-Oriented

My foundation is qualitative, but this residency is also an opportunity to develop skills in more quantitative or computational approaches, through collaboration with the Samouraï team.

Open and Contributive

All work produced will be published under a permissive license, in the spirit of open research. I retain my copyright, but I grant Samouraï Coop a non-exclusive license to reproduce, publish, and distribute the content produced. A mandatory credit will be applied: “© Maël Rolland — published with Samouraï Coop, [year]”. I reserve the right to freely reuse all content (academic articles, books, personal website, republications).

With ZôÖma and the team, I also want to experiment with a system that allows analyses to be publicly commented on and amended (GitHub or a dedicated contribution system).

4 — Contributing to the Long Term: Document, Structure, Transmit

Samouraï Coop is—and remains—autonomous and self-funded. This independence is precious: it guarantees the freedom to experiment, document, and share without compromise.

My role (and my own independence) is part of this trajectory:

To structure and consolidate the knowledge accumulated by Samouraï Coop and other projects—objectives, means, experiments, successes, and failures.
To produce new analytical and practical tools, to allow other structures (cooperatives, associations, SCICs, Web3 collectives) to benefit from this experience.

All Lab deliverables—glossaries, analyses, protocols, thematic files—will be published open source, to be enriched over time by Samouraï and by all organizations wishing to experiment with more equitable and democratic models.

5 — Toward a Shared Knowledge Infrastructure

My ambition is simple: to make research a commons, not a closed artifact. To document the successes and setbacks of projects, so that future ones can benefit from accumulated intelligence rather than starting from scratch. And, ultimately, to contribute to the emergence of a shared knowledge infrastructure between cooperatives, DAOs, and commons-oriented collectives.

If you are interested in these questions, feel free to contact us or follow our publications.