Experiments paved the way for modern DAOs Early DAOs were collective investment vehicles designed to function like decentralized venture funds. Tokens represented voting rights and economic interests in the DAO. Every participant was rewarded on Ethereum for their contribution regardless of their contribution. DAO winter coincided with the bear mar... See more

While it is possible for DAOs to emulate cooperative governance, it’s more common to observe the easier-to-implement governance pattern of one-token, one-vote, since verifying one’s personhood is still a nascent field in the world of blockchain. 

A few years ago, people started asking whether these governance systems could be improved by using “on-chain” governance, which basically means giving network participants a more formal way to vote using tokens. Probably the first and most important on-chain DAO is called MakerDAO.