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An overview of decentralized autonomous organizations on the blockchain

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Published:14 October 2020Publication History

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.

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        cover image ACM Other conferences
        OpenSym '20: Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration
        August 2020
        149 pages
        ISBN:9781450387798
        DOI:10.1145/3412569

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        Publication History

        • Published: 14 October 2020

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        OpenSym '20 Paper Acceptance Rate12of21submissions,57%Overall Acceptance Rate108of195submissions,55%

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