Some thoughts on DAOs - past, present and future

Recently, because of the Matters web3 study club, I have begun to come into contact with Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). People who embrace DAOs like a16z believe that future job opportunities will come from DAOs rather than companies, while skeptics begin to reflect on DAOs. At the same time, there is a long-term problem of lack of job security.

Whatever is true, DAOs do offer a new outlet for a society dominated by mega-corporations for the past 20+ years. The more I get to know DAO, the more I think about it, what is the context and background of its rise that makes DAO a very attractive form, and makes the pioneers of web3 jump in without hesitation, jumping in without job resignation, and pulling one by one to become one of them.

The first one is undoubtedly the domination of tech giants. One of the most attractive aspects of web3 is the rebellion against the old establishment. The decentralization of the blockchain ledger rebels against the centralized bank and the country. The cryptocurrency rebels against the fiat currency and NFT allows creation The DAO rebels against the monotonous 9-to-5 life of a fixed salary office.

But the story is far more than that. What few people mention is that the past 2 or 30 years happened to be the era of vigorous neoliberalism. Although there are giants in the technology industry, other industries are constantly being consolidated, and small but beautiful businesses in different fields have disappeared one by one. , the streets are replaced by cookie-cutter chain storefronts. This is especially true in the UK, go to any town and you'll always find a Starbucks or Costa on the main street, a Tesco or a Sensbury in the supermarket, Greggs in bakeries and Waterstone in bookstores.

Large corporations eat up the diversity of life, and it is the people in these jobs that suffer as well. This phenomenon is also known as globalization. When people all over the world share the same "brand" and memory, the scary thing behind it is that a few large companies dominate more and more aspects of our lives.

And DAOs provide such a way out.

In fact, before the advent of DAO, people have been doing things together in a "decentralized" way for many years, such as the open source community that is common in the technology circle, or the purpose-based social movement. Naturally, tools have long been prepared to make cross-border decentralized work possible, such as google doc, google drive, HackMD, notion, Discord, Slack. Web3 people will say that these tools are not web3, there are many problems, but it also happens that these web2 tools allow us to seamlessly connect with web3. From this perspective, decentralized autonomy is long before the word DAO was invented. Appearing in our lives, the core difference is of course that there is no Token, but there are already other elements for brewing a DAO. The important thing is to first generate DAO, and then develop more tools. There is no doubt that more and better underlying facilities and tools will further promote the development of DAO.

The emergence of Token allows us to understand the DAO implementation of web3, because with Token, the contribution of participants can be calculated and quantified, and through the agreement, decentralized governance is possible, which is especially suitable for financial agreements that only need to vote and not allocate funds . The first DAO appeared in 2016. Although it had an unsatisfactory ending (hacked by hackers, resulting in a hard fork of Ethereum), this is the original prototype of DAO, a fund-raising Token, which determines the use of funds through on-chain governance. , has also allowed many financial agreements to spring up like mushrooms.

The next step in the agreement is a collectible DAO, ConstitionDAO, SpiceDAO, BlockbusterDAO, and Fansi Crowdfunding to buy a favorite target. The goal is very simple, the governance is also very simple, and the problems faced are also clear at a glance. How should DAO manage the purchased things? , how to adapt to the legal framework and risks?

With the rise of NFT and the combination of POAP, community-based DAOs have opened up more space for our imagination. DAOs such as Bankless DAO, Seed Club, Odyssey, and SeeDAO have attracted more talented people in Silicon Valley. They are no longer just financial engineers and villagers fans. Now with the addition of planning and operation talents, artists and writers, a more organic community is formed, and there are more possibilities, which can be an incubator, a translation agency, a hobby organization, a research group, and an education mechanism. There can also be Sub-DAOs under the DAO, just like there are villages around a small town and satellite towns next to a city.

When Mr. Bai Yu, the founder of SeeDAO in the Chinese world, shared his experience, he opened up my further understanding of DAO. For example, complete on-chain governance is not necessarily required, and branch transactions within DAO can be decided by consensus more quickly. If DAO is established from the company, it must be completely weaned and separated in the end. Stealing the white paper is useless because people can’t steal it, DAO’s The moat is not how beautiful the white paper is, but the consensus. Consensus (Consensus) and culture (Vibe) are the most difficult and most important part of the current DAO establishment. This is a bit like a company. Great companies usually pay attention to culture, and only a strong culture can make a great company. But the difference is that the company culture is built from the top down, while the DAO culture is built from the bottom up.

For me, if DAOs want to gain an important place in human society, there must be many small and beautiful DAOs, just like the structure of "company" became the mainstream structure of business society after the 20th century, that is, because only five people can A company can be established, and the company can be a giant enterprise with 10,000 people or a mini unit with less than 10 people. The prerequisite for DAO to achieve this is the improvement of tools and infrastructure, such as a better reputation and points system, social tools that are more in line with DAO, and even a decentralized identity collection DID that integrates footprints on the chain. It takes a lot of time, but there is no doubt that DAO provides a completely different imagination space for the future. The problem is that we are still in a very early stage and need more people to participate, explore, build and share.

There is no good conclusion, Just DAO it.