What began as an attempt by Travelware and its founder Michele Zavoli to fix tourism governance in Italian villages and African coastal communities is now evolving into a full‑scale DAO based in Ras Al Khaimah’s innovation district in the UAE. Building on this experience, Synphonai DAO is being co‑founded and driven by a core trio – Michele Zavoli, Alexander (Alex) Norta and Sowelu Avanzo – who are turning years of field work, academic research and DAO engineering into an AI‑ and blockchain‑native “governance engine” for complex, multi‑stakeholder systems.
At its core, Synphonai converts existing policies, bylaws and org charts into a fully compliant on‑chain governance system, enabling from a handful up to thousands of stakeholders to propose, vote and adapt workflows in real time, with AI monitoring and blockchain audit trails built in. The approach was first validated inside Travelware’s ecosystem, where destinations needed to coordinate public institutions, operators, residents, NGOs and investors; now the same engine is being generalized for cooperatives, consortia, DAOs, municipalities and corporate networks that risk collapsing into “coordination hell”.
The move to RAK gives Synphonai DAO – co‑developed by Norta DeSyCo OÜ and Travelware SRL SB – a jurisdiction explicitly focused on digital assets, enterprise transformation and cross‑border innovation. Organizations will be able to upload their documents and let Synphonai’s AI automatically generate DAO‑style workflows, stakeholder roles, voting rules, compliance checks and upgradable on‑chain flows, compressing months of legal and consulting work into days. With a design aligned to European trust‑services regulation (eIDAS 2.0), blockchain audit trails and automated reporting, the system is being built to operate across the EU and UAE, and to plug into national token registries and digital‑asset infrastructures that Travelware is already exploring through its tourism pilots.
Behind this technical stack lies an academic and philosophical backbone that also shapes Travelware’s broader vision of “collective intelligence infrastructures”. The collaboration between DAO pioneer Alex Norta and computer scientist Sowelu Avanzo is explicitly rooted in the classical disciplines of trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), applied to governance design. Norta supervised Avanzo in his PhD path, training him in this rigorous method and helping to structure a research program that rapidly turned into a string of high‑impact publications on model‑driven DAO design and token economies, culminating in an award‑winning PhD thesis.
Avanzo’s trajectory – Under Norta’s supervision he became a highly cited fresh PhD graduate recognized in the blockchain community with the prestigious IEEE Blockchain 2025 Award (EMEA Region 8) – mirrors Synphonai’s ambition: transform fragile, ad‑hoc structures into robust, formally grounded systems that can scale. His work on visual modeling languages and low‑code generation of smart‑contract skeletons now underpins Synphonai’s ability to turn organizational diagrams into executable governance logic, while Norta’s long track record in DAO formalization and identity frameworks feeds into Synphonai’s self‑sovereign identity, event‑driven decision models and intelligent oracles.
For Web3 and crypto readers, the narrative now connects clearly back to Travelware and Zavoli’s original mission. Travelware uses Web3, AI and IoT to help communities co‑govern tourism and keep more value in their territories; Synphonai DAO exports that same coordination logic from destinations to the wider “coordination economy”. From its base in RAK, with Travelware as a core venture partner, Synphonai is being built as infrastructure rather than as a speculative token – a platform where AI‑assisted governance, formally verified DAO design and regulatory‑ready digital identity become standard tools for any organization that has outgrown emails and meetings, but still wants decisions to remain transparent, inclusive and accountable.
