Eight Qualities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

The superscalable quality indicates the organization can reach large membership sizes and in contrast to the modern firm, become more capable as it scales.A theory of the firm suggests that as organizations grow, they develop inefficiency costs directly proportional to their membership size. In the case of decentralized autonomous organizations, th... See more

The permissionless quality indicates any entity can enter and exit the organization according to public criteria.

While encompassing traditional for-profit models as well, the earlier term DAC (decentralized autonomous company) was also used to imagine a natural system that is conceived of as self-governing within a humanist framework. Linked to the eleventh century “deodand” legal entity, a physical object that has been granted personhood in order to be litig... See more

The field of game theory models interactions between rational decision makers, identifying dilemmas of cooperative, zero-sum, and symmetric games and their inverse. As a counterforce, decentralized autonomous organizations broadly apply mechanism design through economic incentives or social norms to achieve rough consensus and running orgs. Headles... See more

The aligned quality indicates the organization possesses incentives to overcome common problems of coordination.

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

The conceptual ultimatum of exit, voice, and loyalty figures largely in debates on agency. Decentralized autonomous organizations could add the qualification of entrance, meaning that any entity can create, fork, or join the network.