Yeah I'm usually very anti crypto anything but DAOs sound like a promising concept. Might be a great way to get rid of VCs and run international workers coops with initial funding though ICOs. A DAO based startup studio / incubator would be interesting too.
How about a DAO that only transacts in DAI and has no token representation of its shares, just prorata ownership and voting weight from initial funding via that decentralized stablecoin
The irony being that nobody would notice if these exist or are prevalent specifically because there is no token doing the advertising
OlympusDAO is doing something like this, but they do have a token - DAO members get paid and theres a staking process that lets them accrue more of the token. The token is backed by a treasury and is worth at least 1 DAI.
Decentralized autonomous organization. It’s a collaboration mechanism for forming an organization wherein you can define the compensation and governance structure as open source code. Moloch DAO is one of the better known and simple to understand instances of a DAO, though it’s scope is limited to managing membership and voting on projects to fund [0].
I don't understand why you'd prefer to work in a structure governed by contract-written-as-code compared to contract-written-as-anything-else. Seems like you could put any arbitrary set of rules in a regular contract too.
Because it can be enforced without being tied to a specific jurisdiction, expensive lawyers and army of accountants.
Imagine a company the size of Google/Alphabet organized in a similar way to something like https://dxdao.eth.link/#/, where employees have more say in what they work on and don't have layers of expensive management.
Or a Y Combinator or a DAO of indie hacker businesses working as a cooperative, investing in new products, sharing resources, etc.
Or an open source alternative to Uber / Seamless / Instacart where users can vote and bid on features and reward contributors who implement them. I'm sure a product driven by customers and makers would look a lot different than the exploitative middleman businesses that dominate tech at the moment.
There's the enforcement aspect that other commenters mention, but what's maybe more relevant to the OP is that every member's contract is open source. You know exactly what everyone is making and the mechanism for making decisions at the governance level is totally transparent by design.
But we're not talking about scams here, as far as I can tell. Contracts aren't being thrown aside and blatantly ignored. Just misunderstood, possibly even exploitative, rules. Or in the case of "go forward" comp like in the article, it's really just a negotiation thing, more than a contract thing.
Exploitative, deceptive, or otherwise malicious contract rules are still possible, here, no? I have a hard time imagining an automated code checker that is smart enough to figure out "this is a more risky investment based on how the rules are set up!" in a way that a paper contract couldn't be similarly analyzed.
After all, a public company is about as decentralized as it gets - decentralized enough that most of the owners have basically zero individual power compared to the people appointed to run it - and there have been plenty of shenanigans in those over the years (which is why they now have a lot of regulation as a result).
Is this effectively just "corporations, now with less regulations because we haven't yet seen the ways this particular form can be used maliciously?"
Consider "hollywood accounting" - if the smart contract says "profit is split 60% to 40% between the two of us" but I'm in a position to choose to classify expenses and various other costs in a way that means "profit" gets computed in the system as X instead of 5X, what happens?
Which part of the system is transparent? The smart contract?
Despite the name, a smart contract is just a software program. It is not a legal contract nor is it recognized as such in a court of law. As such it has no legal force.
When that changes, I’ll sit up and take notice. Until then, the crypto folks are just spinning their wheels pretending one is like the other.