DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters

In summary, eight imagined qualities of decentralized autonomous organizations are autopoietic, alegal, superscalable, executable, permissionless, aligned, co-owned, and mnemonic. Drawn from observation, these qualities trace desires for interdependence growing in the cracks of legacy institutions, as well as the dubious inheritance of cybernetic d... See more

Key Ideas

The core question explored in this post: do highly decentralized DAOs work, or should their governance start to more closely resemble trad corporations?

Vitalik's main point: there are certain use cases where decentralization is very important. There may be a relatively small number of these orgs, but they will be the very important ones.

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Decentralized governance is at the heart of the ideological foundation of crypto: equal participation for all actors. The playbook of progressive decentralization is being followed by more decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Users and tokenholders can now have more control over protocol parameters, treasury spending, and, in general, the industr... See more

The point of decentralizing an organization is to remove control from a single entity or group. Decentralization—among other things—creates censorship resistance, a redundancy against corruption, and makes the organization more resilient against technical failures. However, as we will discuss later, some DAOs might appear to operate smoothly, but a... See more