DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide | Ethereum Foundation Blog

The term “DAO” is applied to so many different organizations that it has become close to meaningless. Whatever DAOs are, they must fall under 3 clear and distinct concepts: 1) be decentralised, 2) be organisations and 3) be autonomous.

Following prior work, we define DAOs as non-hierarchical organizations that perform and record routine tasks on a peer-to-peer, cryptographically secure, public network, and rely on the voluntary contributions of their internal stakeholders to operate, manage, and evolve the organization through a democratic consultation process (Valkenburgh et al.... See more

4. DAOs are trust-less organizations owned and governed by community members. DAOs have smart contracts for decentralization and humans on the periphery for governance.