Scaling Trust in DAOs: Trustware vs Socialware

However, anyone that has worked within a DAO in the past year knows this is rarely the case. In reality, many DAOs operate using socialware, relying on documented practices and hoping there is sufficient human attention and coordination to follow these written rules.

By using blockchains as our underlying assurance mechanism, we can codify organizational governance through code and not purely documented principles that rely on humans to coordinate around. In doing so, we foster greater trust between parties by minimizing trust in people and maximizing trust in technology.

As of now, most DAOs orient heavily towards socialware, for apparent reasons:

• Socialware is flexible and can adapt to changing circumstances much faster than trustware.


• Socialware is easier to implement, requiring less technical knowledge and execution


• Trustware can leave a DAO susceptible to governance attack vectors


• Trustware is still underdevelop

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Contracts, laws, charters, constitutions, and other such agreements are mechanisms that organizations use to set rules between agents in a system in order to assure certain behaviors. This assurance can come from two places:

• Socialware - Mechanisms that create assurances through human relationships, incuring a high social coordination cost


• Trustware

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The high social coordination cost of socialware often results in a gap between how a system is supposed to operate vs how it actually operates.