Preface: Bitcoin opened the Pandora box of crypto-world and decentralized the global economy. DAO infused decentralized organization with “artificial intelligence”, self-motivation and autonomous governance. All is without manipulation and all operations are executed by code. This is the most fascinating point of DAO: it’s an organized yet autonomous world, and a democratic and liberal world.
In crypto-world, we often come across the term “DAO,” what does it stand for?
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization.It’s name has already revealed that DAO is a decentralized autonomous “organization.” The “organization” can be a project, a platform or a community.
In fact, the earliest concept of DAO was put forward in a book called “The Starfish and the Spider” written by American writer Ori Brafman. In his book, he compares centralized organizations to spiders, and distributed organizations to starfish. Spider dies if its head is chopped off (centralized organizations can’t live without a head). Starfish, on the other hand, is composed of a bunch of cells that are equal to each other (decentralized), and each tentacles torn off by can grow into a complete starfish. Relatively speaking, a decentralized organization like starfish is much more vigorous than a centralized one.
In cryptoworld, DAO isn’t managed by a small group of people, but configured by codes and the codes are executed by computer network. This means no one has privilege and everyone is equal under the rules. It’s like the ideal form of democracy that everyone obeys the same law.
That’s why sometimes people regard DAO’s decentralization as democratic autonomy. It has several features, such as: all amendments can be voted
by everyone rather than just a small group of decision makers in the organization; all votes are counted by software so no manipulation can be cast upon. This eliminates the possibility of tampering of vote counts, realizing total transparency and full visibility.
DAO members don’t need to put trust on any one. As a result, DAO can be composed of many people who don’t even know each other. In other word, people can cooperate with each beyond any physical limitations and ensure that all parties are working for the benefit of the project itself.
There is such a company, its mysterious founder has never put any effort into it after it’s established, he simply handed the company to his community. It hasn’t hired any employee however the company still runs normally, because a group of faithfuls are supporting it. Later the founder disappeared but increasingly more people are into it.Ten years later, this amazing company set a market value of jaw-dropping US$1.3 trillion in November this year, surpassing Facebook and Tencent, and squeezed into the top five companies in the world by market value.
You may have guessed the company’s name, that’s right, Bitcoin! It is a “monster” who receives both praise and vituperation, yet it’s no doubt the most famous and most successful DAO in the world. Its mystery boss’s name is Satoshi.
“Thank you Satoshi. Whoever you are.”
The most fascinating part of DAO is that it runs in a self-motivated autonomous way without any central institution.
DAO on Ethereum, compared to those on Bitcoin, are often more complex. Because DAO represents a revolutionary financial technology driven by Ethereum. Before Ethereum, there was no way to decentralize an organization in a globally accessible, non-hierarchical, and interoperable way. Bitcoin only stays at economy level.
A traditional enterprise relies on the boss or an elite team to execute decisions, while DAO relies entirely on smart contracts to execute orders, it completely subverts the stereotypical operating mode of corporate governance. These smart contracts are highly visible, verifiable, and publicly auditable, so any potential member can fully understand the operation of the agreement at each step. Those smart contracts lay the basic framework for the operation of the DAO.
The concept of DAO is spreading fast in crypto industry. ConstitutionDAO illustrated the charm of "MEME+DAO", its token “People” has also become well-known. In addition, EOS BP nodes voted to freeze all the tokens of the inactive development parent company "block.one".
From dictatorship to democracy, from passive governance to autonomous governance, this is the spirit passed down by the DAO. Behind the code is a subversion of power and a perfect inheritance of the blockchain spirit "decentralization."
Conclusion: As Nutbox CMO Sunny said, "The future digital enterprise form has to be DAO." DAO is the future of venture capital, and will soon become the second major breakthrough in the blockchain field after digital cash. Perhaps, 2022 will be the first year of DAO!