ABSTRACT
Blockchain technology has emerged as a new paradigm to build decentralized systems which do not require a central authority. It is most popular for enabling Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. However, blockchain applications span beyond Finance, and recently it has been applied to decentralized governance. Blockchain-enabled "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" (DAOs) have emerged as a new form of collective governance, in which communities may organize themselves relying on decentralized infrastructure. In this article, we introduce the concept of DAO and review the main software platforms that offer DAO creation as a service, which simplifies the use of DAOs to non-blockchain experts; namely: Aragon, DAOstack, DAOhaus and Colony. These platforms will be compared by showing their key features. Finally, we will review the available visualisation tools for DAOs, and we will introduce our open-source tool to plot DAOs activity, DAO-Analyzer. We will illustrate its potential with the case of the DAO Genesis Alpha, which is the main DAO of the DAOstack project.
- Marcella Atzori. 2015. Blockchain technology and decentralized governance: Is the state still necessary? Available at SSRN 2709713 (2015).Google Scholar
- Kate Beecroft. 2019. Genesis 1.0 | Mission, Principles, and Structure. https://medium.com/daostack/genesis- 1-0-6184dffbfe8aGoogle Scholar
- Fran Casino, Thomas K Dasaklis, and Constantinos Patsakis. 2019. A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: current status, classification and open issues. Telematics and Informatics 36 (2019), 55--81.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel Cawrey. 2014. 37Coins Plans Worldwide Bitcoin Access with SMS-Based Wallet. https://www.coindesk.com/37coins-plans-worldwide-bitcoin-access-sms-based-walletGoogle Scholar
- Konstatinos Christidis and Michael Devetsikiotis. 2016. Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things. IEEE Access 4 (2016), 2292--2303.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Luisanna Cocco, Andrea Pinna, and Michele Marchesi. 2017. Banking on Blockchain: Costs Savings Thanks to the Blockchain Technology. Future Internet 9 (06 2017), 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9030025Google Scholar
- Paulo Colombo. 2020. How does Committees work? https://medium.com/p2p-models/how-does-committees-work-d7ed116a7306Google Scholar
- Chris Dannen. 2017. Introducing Ethereum and Solidity. Vol. 1. Springer.Google Scholar
- Primavera De Filippi and Samer Hassan. 2018. Blockchain technology as a regulatory technology: From code is law to law is code. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02507 (2018).Google Scholar
- Quinn DuPont. 2017. Experiments in algorithmic governance: A history and ethnography of "The DAO," a failed decentralized autonomous organization. Bitcoin and beyond (2017), 157--177.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Youssef El Faqir, Javier Arroyo, and Abel Serrano. 2019. Visualization of the evolution of collaboration and communication networks in wikis. In Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. 1--10.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Matan Field. 2018. Decentralized Governance Matters. https://medium.com/daostack/decentralized-governance-first-principles- 1fc6eaa492edGoogle Scholar
- Matan Field. 2018. Holographic consensus---part 1. https://medium.com/daostack/holographic-consensus-part-1-116a73ba1e1cGoogle Scholar
- Primavera De Filippi and Samer Hassan. 2016. Blockchain technology as a regulatory technology: From code is law to law is code. First Monday 21, 12 (Nov. 2016). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i12.7113Google Scholar
- Bolici Francesco, Howison James, and Crowston Kevin. 2016. Stigmergic coordination in FLOSS development teams: Integrating explicit and implicit mechanisms. Cognitive Systems Research 38 (2016), 14 - 22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys. 2015.12.003 Special Issue of Cognitive Systems Research - Human-Human Stigmergy.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ven Gist. 2019. Moloch Primer for Humans. https://medium.com/odyssy/moloch-primer-for-humans-9e6a4f258f78Google Scholar
- Frank Hofmann, Simone Wurster, Eyal Ron, and Moritz Böhmecke-Schwafert. 2017. The immutability concept of blockchains and benefits of early standardization. In 2017 ITU Kaleidoscope: Challenges for a Data-Driven Society (ITU K). IEEE, 1--8.Google Scholar
- Yang Hu, Harold Glenn A Valera, and Les Oxley. 2019. Market efficiency of the top market-cap cryptocurrencies: Further evidence from a panel framework. Finance Research Letters 31 (2019), 138--145.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Guillermo Jimenez-Diaz, Abel Serrano, and Javier Arroyo. 2018. A Wikia census: motives, tools and insights. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. 1--6.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel Kronovet. 2019. Aragon, DAOstack, Colony, Moloch. http://kronosapiens.github.io/blog/2019/06/16/aragon-daostack-colony-moloch.htmlGoogle Scholar
- The LAO. 2019. The LAO: A For-Profit, Limited Liability Autonomous Organization. https://medium.com/openlawofficial/the-lao-a-for-profit-limited-liability-autonomous-organization-9eae89c9669cGoogle Scholar
- Adam Levi. 2019. A Technical Analysis of the Genesis Alpha Hack. https://medium.com/daostack/a-technical-analysis-of-the-genesis-alpha-hack-f8e34433c14bGoogle Scholar
- MakerDAO. 2020. White paper. https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/Google Scholar
- Morshed Mannan. 2018. Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project. Erasmus Law Review 11 (2018), 190.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jennifer Marlow, Laura Dabbish, and Jim Herbsleb. 2013. Impression formation in online peer production: activity traces and personal profiles in github. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 117--128.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Muhammad Izhar Mehar, Charles Louis Shier, Alana Giambattista, Elgar Gong, Gabrielle Fletcher, Ryan Sanayhie, Henry M Kim, and Marek Laskowski. 2019. Understanding a revolutionary and flawed grand experiment in blockchain: the DAO attack. Journal of Cases on Information Technology 21, 1 (2019), 19--32.Google ScholarCross Ref
- William Metcalfe. 2020. Ethereum, Smart Contracts, DApps. In Blockchain and Crypt Currency. Springer, Singapore, 77--93.Google Scholar
- Satoshi Nakamoto and A Bitcoin. 2008. A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin.-URL: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf (2008).Google Scholar
- Grace Rachmany. 2020. The State of the DAO: Rise, Fall, and Rise. https://hackernoon.com/the-state-of-the-dao-rise-fall-and-rise-0l8837dkGoogle Scholar
- Nicole Radziwill. 2018. Blockchain revolution: How the technology behind Bitcoin is changing money, business, and the world. The Quality Management Journal 25, 1 (2018), 64--65.Google Scholar
- Alex Rea, Daniel Kronovet, Aron Fischer, and Jack du Rose. 2020. COLONY Technical White Paper. https://colony.io/whitepaper.pdfGoogle Scholar
- David Rozas, Antonio Tenorio-Fornés, Silvia Díaz-Molina, and Samer Hassan. 2018. When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance. Available at SSRN 3272329 (2018).Google Scholar
- Alejandro Santander and Aragon One. 2019. My First Aragon App: Voting supercharged with DAOstack's Holographic Consensus (Part 4). https://blog.aragon.one/my-first-aragon-app-voting-supercharged-with-daostacks-holographic-consensus-part-4/Google Scholar
- Abel Serrano, Javier Arroyo, and Samer Hassan. 2018. Participation Inequality in Wikis: A Temporal Analysis Using WikiChron. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (Paris, France) (OpenSym '18). ACM, Article 12, 7 pages.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Madhusudan Singh and Shiho Kim. 2019. Blockchain technology for decentralized autonomous organizations. In Advances in Computers. Vol. 115. Elsevier, 115--140.Google Scholar
- A. Soleimani, A. Bhuptani, J. Young, L. Haber, and R. Sethuram. 2019. The Moloch DAO. https://github.com/MolochVentures/Whitepaper/blob/master/Whitepaper.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Melanie Swan. 2015. Blockchain: Blueprint for a new economy. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aragon team. 2018. The Aragon Manifesto. https://aragon.org/blog/the-aragon-manifesto-4a21212eac03Google Scholar
- Sergei Tikhomirov, Ekaterina Voskresenskaya, Ivan Ivanitskiy, Ramil Takhaviev, Evgeny Marchenko, and Yaroslav Alexandrov. 2018. Smartcheck: Static analysis of ethereum smart contracts. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain. 9--16.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sarah Underwood. 2016. Blockchain beyond bitcoin.Google Scholar
- Dejan Vujičić, Dijana Jagodić, and Siniša Randić. 2018. Blockchain technology, bitcoin, and Ethereum: A brief overview. In 2018 17th international symposium INFOTEH-JAHORINA. IEEE, 1--6.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ezra Weller. 2019. An Explanation of DAOstack in Fairly Simple Terms. https://medium.com/daostack/an-explanation-of-daostack-in-fairly-simple-terms-1956e26b374Google Scholar
- Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz. 2004. Prediction Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, 2 (June 2004), 107--126. https://doi.org/10.1257/0895330041371321Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gavin Wood et al. 2014. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum project yellow paper 151, 2014 (2014), 1--32.Google Scholar
- Aaron Wright and Primavera De Filippi. 2015. Decentralized blockchain technology and the rise of lex cryptographia. Available at SSRN 2580664 (2015).Google Scholar
- Zibin Zheng, Shaoan Xie, Hong-Ning Dai, Xiangping Chen, and Huaimin Wang. 2018. Blockchain challenges and opportunities: A survey. International Journal of Web and Grid Services 14, 4 (2018), 352--375.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- An overview of decentralized autonomous organizations on the blockchain
Recommendations
Governance challenges of blockchain and decentralized autonomous organizations
Blockchain and the Public SectorThe rise of blockchain has resulted in discussions on (new) governance models with multiple actors collaborating. Incidents and problems occurred due to flaws in blockchain protocols, smart contracts and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (...
DAO-Analyzer: Exploring Activity and Participation in Blockchain Organizations
CSCW'22 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social ComputingDecentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a new kind of organization that relies on blockchain software to govern their projects. Typically, DAO members may put forward and vote on proposals. For instance these proposals may consist on someone ...
Why blockchains need the law: Secondary rules as the missing piece of blockchain governance
ICAIL '19: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and LawGovernance issues limit blockchains' ability to evolve and face unforeseen challenges. It seems possible to argue that this impasse is because most blockchains lack meta-rules. This work considers blockchains as a socio-technical system of rules, in ...
Comments