Do DAOs Hold the Secret of Orchestrating Collaboration?
Can DAOs address the current fallibility and idiosyncrasies of human collaboration to create better organizations and communities?
On this episode of the Cohere podcast, we (Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas) discuss the early promise (and obvious issues) with DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations). Bill and Lauren have an in-depth discussion to try and separate the value and future utility of the DAO model vs. the current hype.
DAOs have been described as "digital flash mobs with money" by Raihan Anwar, manager of the Friends with Benefits DAO, and a blockchain-based "virtual entity that has a certain set of members or shareholders who have the right to spend the entity's funds and modify its code" by Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum.
A recent article by Tarun Chitra on A16Z’s Future blog suggests that the key factors for forming a DAO vs a more “traditional” organization are curation, security and risk: “DAOs work best when the governance burden related to curation, security, and risk can be reduced faster than the natural increase in coordination costs that accompanies the need to have members involved in voting on every decision made.”
In this episode, we discuss discuss a range of questions related to DAOs, including:
The many and disparate definitions of DAO
Current examples and use cases
The components, or key moving parts of a DAO
How does the future of DAOs relate to the future direction of virtual communities?
What questions remain about DAOs?
Key Quotes:
“It seems like a lot of the definitions (of DAOs) may be confusing the concept of decentralization with democratization”
“The current set of categorical examples, if you will: there's decentralized finance. There's collector or curator DAO - pooling money to to buy things like a copy of the Constitution. There are gaming guilds. There are DAOs set up around developing products. And then there's kind of a longer tail of applications.” - Bill
”The one (example) that I gravitated towards when I was first really exploring Web3 concepts was ENS - the Ethereum name service. That's where you can your own handle it's bought and sold like web domain names. And that is persistent across your web three use, like logging into any type of account. You've got that persistent identity layer.” - Lauren
“I mean, I think there are some really interesting bright spots in here and this necessary sort of skew towards commercialization. So I'm being an apologist here, but this skew towards commercialization and speculation, you know, is helping accelerate us making the 99% of the mistakes so that we get the 1% benefit.
Right? So again, I remain personally very optimistic about what's going on, but I also realize I don't see anything yet long-term from a model, from an example, from a next practice sort of perspective.” - Bill
Resources from this episode:
The Promise of DAOs, the Latest Craze in Crypto - Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) Canon - Sonal Chokshi, Zoran Basich, Guy Wuollet, Future
The different flavors of DAOs in Web3 - JD Lasica
YOUR DAO GUIDE – THE MOST IMPORTANT DAO CATEGORIES DEFINING THE SPACE - Ledger
All the Questions About DAOs You Wish You Could Ask with Danny Greene from MeebitsDAO - Welcome to the Metaverse Podcast
The Future of Work is Not Corporate — It’s DAOs and Crypto Networks - Ben Schecter, Future
DAOs May Be the Future of Work, but Don’t Bet on Them Being the Next Big Asset Class - Andrew Thurman, CoinDesk
Building and Running a DAO: Why Governance Matters -Tarun Chitra, Future
The man who got fired by his DAO - Casey Newton, Platformer
Organization Legos: The State of DAO Tooling - Nichanan Kesonpat
DAO Tooling Matrix (MASSIVE list of tools and platforms) - Rob Sarrow / @rsarrow
House of DAOs - The MetaGame Wiki
Metaverse Working Group
During the show, we mentioned convening a small workgroup for discussion, learning and sensemaking. If you would be interested in participating, please fill out the short form here to be considered.
