DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, is one of the strongest new trends in the blockchain industry. This article is an attempt to consolidate material on this promising topic.
DAO is:
- decentralized autonomous organizations, where participants decide with voting on the community direction,
- programmed enterprises and ventures,
- in the next stage: programmable companies and programmable corporations,
- native internet companies.
- decentralized organizations can serve as: proof of seriousness of the venture, tool for coordination of efforts and communication, and perform management functions (mainly automation).
Important sources and links
A16z report: How to Win the Future
1729: The ABC of DAOs.
A16z: Building and Running a DAO: Why Governance Matters
The Generalist: Briefing (also list of types and existing organizations)
Cooper Turley: DAO Landscape.
Resources for web3 programmers.
What are DAOs for?
In the future, DAOs will be a way to coordinate and manage human activity.
The advantages of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are:
- establishing an organization using cloud and blockchain tools, to achieve goals with less costs of capital and time
- openness and transparency,
- enabling people to directly participate in managing, investing or owning,
- rewarding participants for the effort put into success with certain, programmable rules.
In the future, business processes will be considered as programmable blocks. These blocks will then be transformed into sensible, real human labor. Success in terms of the expected effect in the real world would be rewarded with more equity.
One of the benefits is also the possibility to invite many “stakeholders” of the project right from the start. In the world of web 2.0, it was only possible when … shares were issued on the stock exchange.

What does a decentralized organization consist of?
The industry joke says that in the initial stages, DAO consists of Discord and an ETH address.
Seriously, there are a few important parts that are “looked after” with the following software:
- the constitution (set of rules) which define that organization operates autonomously
- ownership organization, e.g. Ethereum token or dedicated framework
- communication tools such as Discord
- voting tools
- vault (ETH, NFT …)
One of the other consideration is the community oriented and the technology-oriented. Emphasizing one of these aspects results in a focus on and development of the parts related to it.
Real life examples
Maker
Friends with Benefits
Challenges for the field
Uncertain legal environment.
An adaptation on the initial stage.
Lots of possible directions of action and the risk of losing the potential.