Eight Qualities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

The shape of this future is rapidly coming into focus and centers around an organization referred to by technologists as “decentralized autonomous organizations,” or DAOs. These DAOs operate with different assumptions than many of today’s traditional legal entities and other business associations. DAOs are not run by boards or managers, but rather ... See more

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations - a topic for a future issue) are so important to this thesis because they become the new framework for a group of specialists to organize and coordinate.

Based on Vitalik Buterin’s DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide from 2014, a DAO could be described then as a capitalized organization in which a software protocol informs its operation, placing automation at its center and humans at its edges. For example, a software protocol could specify the conditions upon which an organiza... See more

Collaborative, internet-native organizations like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) especially offer shared narratives (memes), economic incentives (money) and more flexible local governance structures (management) to move us in the right direction.

Following prior work, we define DAOs as non-hierarchical organizations that perform and record routine tasks on a peer-to-peer, cryptographically secure, public network, and rely on the voluntary contributions of their internal stakeholders to operate, manage, and evolve the organization through a democratic consultation process (Valkenburgh et al.... See more