Co-ops, DAOs, and the way forward for collectives

From my experiences in the two spaces, I have noticed that DAOs tend to be better at enabling collective ownership at scale, even if their cultural understanding of the rights, responsibilities, and accountability associated with ownership is comparatively underdeveloped. And while cooperatives tend to be less successful in securing funding, they a... See more

At the end of the day, the best framework for an organization may not be a choice between a cooperative or DAO model, but a blend of both. Incorporating cooperative values into crypto networks could take the form of a traditional cooperative that bootstraps its network through on-chain tokenized contributions. Alternatively, a DAO could decide to a... See more

Co-ops often emerge as an attempt to respond to market failures and exploitative economic systems. They are designed to bring benefits to their members: good jobs, dignity, and collective agency. Because co-ops are motivated by serving members’ needs, rather than profit, they are often guided by racial and economic justice missions. There aren’t an... See more

Although co-ops and DAOS are both collectively owned and co-determined organizational forms, there are some key differences. Primarily, cooperatives have one-member, one-vote governance. This means that people vote, not dollars. No single member of a cooperative can purchase more power than anyone else... While it is possible for DAOs to emulate co... See more

Not surprisingly, there are a number of organizations currently experimenting with merging the concept of a DAO with the cooperative model. DisCo (Distributed Cooperative) is a framework that uses feminist economics to reorient our ideas of how DAOs can operate more like traditional cooperatives.

-Cryptonetworks and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) as the future of internet-native co-ops: Such networks address two major issues that have prevented traditional cooperative businesses from becoming pervasive: access to capital and complexity of governance. With the issuance of a token, cryptonetworks can benefit from market specula... See more