Andrea Peña-Calvin
Javier Arroyo
Samer Hassan
ABSTRACT
Blockchain technology enables a new form of online community: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), where members typically vote on proposals using tokens. Enthusiasts claim DAOs provide new opportunities for openness, horizontality, and democratization. However, this phenomenon is still under research, especially given the lack of quantitative studies. This paper presents the first census-like quantitative analysis of the whole ecosystem of DAOs, including 30K DAO communities on the main DAO platforms. This enables us to provide insights into the allegedly "democratic'' nature of DAOs, building metrics concerning their lifespan, participation, and power concentration. Most DAOs have a short lifespan and low participation. There is also a positive correlation between community size and voting power concentration. Like other online communities, DAOs seem to follow the iron law: becoming increasingly oligarchic as they grow. Still, a significant amount of DAOs of varying sizes defy this idea by being egalitarian by design.
Supplemental Material
- Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2015. Handbook of Collective Intelligence. MIT Press, Chapter Peer Production: A Form of Collective Intelligence, 175--204.Google Scholar
- Andrea Capiluppi, Patricia Lago, and Maurizio Morisio. 2003. Characteristics of open source projects. In Seventh European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, 2003. Proceedings. IEEE, 317--327.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Youssef Faqir-Rhazoui, Javier Arroyo, and Samer Hassan. 2021. A comparative analysis of the platforms for decentralized autonomous organizations in the Ethereum blockchain. Journal of Internet Services and Applications 12, 1 (2021), 1--20.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Samer Hassan and Primavera De Filippi. 2021. Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Internet Policy Review 10, 2 (2021).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sanna Malinen. 2015. Understanding user participation in online communities: A systematic literature review of empirical studies. Computers in Human Behavior 46 (May 2015), 228--238.Google Scholar
- Robbie Morrison, Natasha CHL Mazey, and Stephen C Wingreen. 2020. The DAO controversy: The case for a new species of corporate governance? Frontiers in Blockchain 3 (2020), 25.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Felipe Ortega, Jesus M Gonzalez-Barahona, and Gregorio Robles. 2008. On the inequality of contributions to Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008). IEEE, 304--304.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrea Peña-Calvin, Jorge Saldivar, Javier Arroyo, and Samer Hassan. 2023. A Categorization of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: The Case of the Aragon Platform. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (2023).Google Scholar
- Aaron Shaw and Benjamin M Hill. 2014. Laboratories of oligarchy? How the iron law extends to peer production. Journal of Communication 64, 2 (2014), 215--238.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Melanie Swan. 2015. Blockchain: Blueprint for a new economy. O'Reilly Media.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Qin Wang, Guangsheng Yu, Yilin Sai, Caijun Sun, Lam Duc Nguyen, Sherry Xu, and Shiping Chen. 2022. An Empirical Study on Snapshot DAOs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.15993 (2022).Google Scholar
- Dennis M. Wilkinson. 2008. Strong regularities in online peer production. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (Chicago, Il, USA) (EC '08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 302--309.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Xi Zhao, Peilin Ai, Fujun Lai, Xin Luo, and Jose Benitez. 2022. Task management in decentralized autonomous organization. Journal of Operations Management 68, 6--7 (2022), 649--674.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Concentration of Power and Participation in Online Governance: the Ecosystem of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
Recommendations
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations for Public Procurement
EASE '23: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software EngineeringBlockchain has been recognised as a technological breakthrough with the ability to support new decentralised security-based solutions in sectors such as information technology and finance. Blockchain allows different communities to create Decentralised ...
Creating Trust in Citizen Participation through Decentralized Autonomous Citizen Participation Organizations (DACPOs)
dg.o 2022: DG.O 2022: The 23rd Annual International Conference on Digital Government ResearchBlockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are systems for transacting and storing value by automatically executing a function without the need for trusted, centralized authorities. Participative budgeting requires voting about ...
Using narratives as tools for channeling participation in online communities
Community members with high sense of community are more likely to use narratives.Members who use and share narratives have higher participation levels.Narratives are useful tools to build cohesive cultures and increase participation.We propose online ...
Comments