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Concept
Decentralized autonomous organization
Summary
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization managed in whole or in part by decentralized computer program, with voting and finances handled through a blockchain. In general terms, DAOs are member-owned communities without centralized leadership. The precise legal status of this type of business organization is unclear.
A well-known example, intended for venture capital funding, was The DAO, which amassed 3.6 million ether (ETH)—Ethereum's mining reward—then worth more than US$70 million in May 2016, and was hacked and drained of in cryptocurrency weeks later. The hack was reversed in the following weeks, and the money restored, via a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain. Most Ethereum miners and clients switched to the new fork while the original chain became Ethereum Classic.
The governance of DAOs is subject to controversy. As these typically allocate and distribute tokens that grant voting rights, their accumulation may lead to concentration of power.
Although the term may be traced back to the 1990s, it was not until 2013 that it became more widely adopted. Although some argue that Bitcoin was the first DAO, the term is only understood today as organizations deployed as smart contracts on top of an existing blockchain network.
Decentralized autonomous organizations are typified by the use of blockchain technology to provide a secure digital ledger to track digital interactions across the internet, hardened against forgery by trusted timestamping and dissemination of a distributed database. This approach eliminates the need to involve a mutually acceptable trusted third party in any decentralized digital interaction or cryptocurrency transaction. The costs of a blockchain-enabled transaction and of the associated data reporting may be substantially offset by the elimination of both the trusted third party and of the need for repetitive recording of contract exchanges in different records.
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