DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters

This could occur in many different ways: For example, all organizational decisions could be determined by tokenholder voting, but token ownership and voting turnout could be widely dispersed among many “minnows” (persons each holding a small % of total token supply/total voting power). Alternatively, different types of decisions could be delegated ... See more

Vitalik argues that a truly decentralized DAO should look to political science for design inspiration. In the future, he predicts these first-order non-corporate organizations will end up supporting second-order organizations that use more leader-driven forms of governance.

The point of decentralizing an organization is to remove control from a single entity or group. Decentralization—among other things—creates censorship resistance, a redundancy against corruption, and makes the organization more resilient against technical failures. However, as we will discuss later, some DAOs might appear to operate smoothly, but a... See more

This topic stirs great passion and while we all like the purity of decentralizing, sometimes "the perfect is the enemy of the good." There are excellent tools when you need incentives to be decentralized, and excellent tools when you can accept a more centralized approach. The answer for a well established DAO is likely to be different from a new o... See more