DAOs: Absorbing the Internet

The company, then, is a modern phenomenon, at least in the way we usually think of it. What seems so embedded and intractable today — the default for most new ventures ​​— is really just humanity’s latest attempt to solve the problem of coordination.

Soon, there may be too many DAOs for classification to make much sense. After all, if you asked someone “what types of LLCs exist?” they’d probably find it tricky to answer the question.

We’re still early when it comes to DAO infrastructure. DAOs have many of the same needs as corporations, but must often deal with greater complexities given their scale, fluidity, and technical stack. That necessitated the emergence of tooling for formation, communication, collaboration, payments, and more. DAOs have a handful of providers to selec... See more

DAOs have clear vulnerabilities that have yet to be fully addressed. The first DAO was famously hacked, with a bad-actor attempting to siphon off millions in Ethereum. While DAOs are safer today, they carry risks. Contributors often join pseudonymously, meaning reputation capital is not entirely on the line. Furthermore, without sufficient protecti... See more

Several projects currently vie for supremacy, including Aragon, Syndicate, Orca, Tribute, and Colony. These are not always directly competitive, as each solution offers a unique value proposition and feature set. What do these projects do? A simple way to think of them is as a crypto-native version of Stripe Atlas — they allow DAOs to get off the g... See more

Various types of DAOs have emerged to serve different use-cases. As interest in the space has increased, DAOs have begun to diversify and experiment with the boundaries of what’s possible. There are DAOs for investing, DAOs for building new products, DAOs for socializing, and many iterations both between and beyond.

AOs are a new way of organizing people. Traditionally, a company structure has been the most effective free-market approach to accruing talent in pursuit of a goal. That labor is usually persuaded and controlled through wages. DAOs seek similar ends — the creation of value — but rely on a decentralized framework in which workers, users, and other s... See more

Essentially, DAOs are owned by the people who create value in them. This is a radical notion and one with real consequence; by expanding beyond the traditional notion of who should “own” an organization, DAOs empower a broad ecosystem to take action and create value on its behalf.