The project “Platform-ised Economies Across Contexts of High Informality” (PEACH) explores how digital platforms (DPs) are reshaping small-scale economic exchanges in contexts marked by high informality and analyses how these practices are embedded within, challenged by, or incorporated into existing policy arrangements, as well as how they might be regulated in the future. PEACH adopts a global comparative focus between Latin America and Europe on urban areas characterised by high levels of informal work: one in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) and the other in Italy (Naples). The research will focus on the beauty and personal care sector (such as barbers, hair stylists, make-up artists, etc.), investigating how DPs blur the lines between formal and informal labour and reshape pre-existing jobs. Fieldwork will explore how DPs influence economic practices both when platforms act as intermediation infrastructures through sector-specific dedicated apps (e.g., AppBarber), and when they serve as tools of visibility and personal branding through social media (e.g., TikTok). Based on a multi-sited ethnographic approach, the project aims to foster a dialogue between labour ethnography and labour law, with the goal of understanding which regulatory outcomes are most necessary for platform-mediated workers in contexts of high informality to support their transition towards social protection and economic stability. The findings will feed into “Fair Platforms in Contexts of High Informality”, a set of policy guidelines to be developed in collaboration with Brazilian scholars and disseminated to a variety of audiences and stakeholders. By combining work ethnography, digital methods, and labour law analysis, PEACH is an interdisciplinary project that aims to re-centre the Global South in current debates on platform capitalism, while offering a new perspective that places informality at the core of the platform economy’s rise over the last decade worldwide.