Distributed Autonomous Organization

A DAO or decentralized autonomous organization is a form of smart contract which aims to reproduce the governance structure of a corporation or coop attached associated with cryptoasset held by the smart contracts.

DAOs are experiments in autonomous governance and voting structures (quadratic voting, continuous voting, etc) which give voting rights proportionally to the "shareholders" of the structure by their percentage of ownership of the governance token issued by the DAO.

DAOs are a form of regulatory arbitrage which attempt to recreate the regulated of creating voting shares in corporations. Instead this DAOs place this practice outside the regulatory perimeter and have no recourse for shareholders in the presence of fraud.

DAOs are best understood as shares in a common enterprise which is run by potentially anonymous entities and which has no restrictions on the provenance of funds held by the "corporation". DAOs may be attached to an enterprise which is attempting to solve a hard public goods problem such as fixing climate change or providing universal basic income.

Examples

References

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  4. Chen, Liang, Tony W. Tong, Shaoqin Tang, and Nianchen Han. 2022. ‘Governance and Design of Digital Platforms: A Review and Future Research Directions on a Meta-Organization’. Journal of Management 48 (1): 147–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063211045023.
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  7. Faqir-Rhazoui, Youssef, Javier Arroyo, and Samer Hassan. 2021. ‘A Comparative Analysis of the Platforms for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations in the Ethereum Blockchain’. Journal of Internet Services and Applications 12 (1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-021-00139-6.
  8. Frey, Seth, P. M. Krafft, and Brian C. Keegan. 2019. ‘“This Place Does What It Was Built for”: Designing Digital Institutions for Participatory Change’. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3 (CSCW): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359134.
  9. Hassan, Samer, and Primavera De Filippi. 2021. ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’. Internet Policy Review 10 (2): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.2.1556.
  10. Hsieh, Ying Ying, Jean Philippe Vergne, Philip Anderson, Karim Lakhani, and Markus Reitzig. 2018. ‘Bitcoin and the Rise of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’. Journal of Organization Design 7 (1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41469-018-0038-1.
  11. Lovett, Matthew, and Lee Thomas. 2021. ‘A Fork in the Road: Perspectives on Sustainability and Decentralised Governance in Digital Institutions’. First Monday 26 (11). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i11.12357.
  12. Lumineau, Fabrice, Wenqian Wang, and Oliver Schilke. 2021. ‘Blockchain Governance-A New Way of Organizing Collaborations?’ Organization Science 32 (2): 500–521. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.1379.
  13. Lustig, Caitlin. 2019. ‘Intersecting Imaginaries: Visions of Decentralized Autonomous Systems’. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3 (CSCW). https://doi.org/10.1145/3359312.
  14. Morrison, Robbie, Natasha C. H. L. Mazey, and Stephen C. Wingreen. 2020. ‘The DAO Controversy: The Case for a New Species of Corporate Governance?’ Frontiers in Blockchain 3 (May). https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2020.00025.
  15. Murray, Alex, Jen Rhymer, and David G. Sirmon. 2021. ‘Humans and Technology: Forms of Conjoined Agency in Organizations’. Academy of Management Review 46 (3): 552–71. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2019.0186.
  16. Poblet, Marta, Darcy W. E. Allen, Oleksii Konashevych, Aaron M. Lane, and Carlos Andres Diaz Valdivia. 2020. ‘From Athens to the Blockchain: Oracles for Digital Democracy’. Frontiers in Blockchain 3: 41. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2020.575662.
  17. Rikken, Olivier, Marijn Janssen, and Zenlin Kwee. n.d. ‘The Ins and Outs of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (Daos)’. Available at SSRN 3989559. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3989559.
  18. Schirrmacher, Nina-Birte, Johannes Rude Jensen, and Michel Avital. 2021. ‘Token-Centric Work Practices in Fluid Organizations: The Cases of Yearn and MakerDAO’. In The 42nd International Conference on Information Systems: ICIS 2021: Building Sustainability and Resilience With Is: A Call for Action. https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2021/is_future_work/is_future_work/17/.
  19. Schneider, Nathan. 2021. ‘Broad-Based Stakeholder Ownership in Journalism: Co-Ops, ESOPs, Blockchains’. Media Industries Journal 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.3998/mij.15031809.0007.203.
  20. Sun, Xiaotong. 2021. ‘Centralized Governance in Decentralized Finance (DeFi): A Case Study of MakerDAO’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3971791.
  21. Tse, Nathan. 2020. ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Corporate Form’. Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 51 (2): 313. https://doi.org/10.26686/vuwlr.v51i2.6573.
  22. Vergne, JP. 2020. ‘Decentralized vs. Distributed Organization: Blockchain, Machine Learning and the Future of the Digital Platform’. Organization Theory 1 (4): 263178772097705. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787720977052.
  23. Wissel, Tim. 2021. ‘Fairness and Freedom for Artists: Towards a Robot Economy for the Music Industry’. https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:72a5c834-177b-4b3c-a6f8-8e69e65cfdf4.
  24. Wright, Steven A. 2021. ‘Measuring DAO Autonomy: Lessons From Other Autonomous Systems’. IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 2 (1): 43–53. https://doi.org/10.1109/tts.2021.3054974.
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