Communities organized around a shared set of rules enforced on the blockchain through a smart contract.
Source: A beginner’s guide to DAOs by Linda Xie
DAOs give us structured ways to collect, invest, and build together.
Inherently transparent, every aspect of the org is public. The most infamous DAO, The DAO, was a decentralized VC fund. Eventually raised 60M hacked, leaving a negative impression/skepticism around DAOs for a while.
All members can still be anonymous and built reputations attached to their pseudonym rather than real identity, hopefully helps to create a more even playing field
Potential Issues
- How does this work for people who want to keep things under NDA/keep IP safe?
- Not everything can be codified, what happens in vaugely defined/legal gray zones?
- Often times no legal protections outside the rules governed by the smart contracts facilitating the DAO
- Tragedy of the Commons: how do we ensure all members of the DAO have stake and participate?
- How/can we enforce who joins a DAO? Would this lead to lower quality discussion and higher noise due to lack of value alignment and group limits?