The lifespan of The DAO was a remarkable indeed. It was the biggest crowdfunded project by a large margin compared to anything before that. It was able to gather more than $150 million USD worth of Ether, nearly 14% of all the ETH at the time. More than 11,000 people participated in the token sale.
But soon it all came crashing down in a spectacular fashion. A vulnerability was discovered that allowed an attacker to drain the funds from the smart contracts. The event sparked a heated debate on how to handle the situation. And the rest is history.
This left a huge scar in the history of Ethereum and in the minds of people. The concept wasn’t flawed, the idea of DAOs was actually one of the first proposed use cases for Ethereum. And the idea of decentralized organizations goes even further back in time. The first really successful implementation on Ethereum just happened to fail.
But consider this, The DAO was just one DAO. That proves the incredible power that DAOs can have. Even The DAO was initially a huge success.
Our goal at Aragon is to see thousands of DAOs come to life.
DAOs are the new avant-garde
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations can do the same as what incandescent light bulbs did for humanity. Bring out the light among the darkness.
As old as the light bulb is as an invention, so are our governance models. Models based on something that was functional and superior to other solutions centuries ago. World was a completely different place in the 1800 century. Violence and wars were the established way of resolving conflicts. When democracy was born, it also enabled people to have things like civil rights and a voice to express their opinions. In today’s world, that voice is lost in the sea of signals. Signals that have become an intrinsic part of our lives. We voice our opinions across the globe to anyone that will listen. And those who should listen, are more interested in clinging on to the power the people have elected them to have. They don’t want to listen to what the people actually have to say.
But with this flow of information and ways to take part from the comforts of our homes, we can finally start trying out revolutionary new models. Models of how we live our lives as social individuals. Democracy seemed to worked for some time, but can we say with no doubt in our minds, that it is the only and best option?
Without the fear of bloodshed and losing our lives over voicing our concerns, we can now create new forms of governance. Where previous generations had to take to the streets, we have the chance to use technology to learn how these different models could work. By exploring and researching different ways of doing things, we can achieve amazing new things. Things like the light bulb, democracy, futarchy and who knows what other ideas people come up with.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are what we will need to implement and use these new forms of organizing. Why does it have to be a DAO? Decentralization on a blockchain guarantees that no government or malicious actor can censor you. Autonomy achieved by deploying a smart contract that executes the code as it is programmed, means no central power or incumbent can compromise the will of your organization. Organizations themselves are usually thought to be traditional institutions like governmental agencies, non-profit foundations, political parties or companies. But in the DAO context, these are only some examples of what can be considered to be an organization. While a traditional organization is usually an entity comprised of multiple people, a DAO can comprise of any entities. And these can be anything from people, to other organizations, to even AI. In this technological era, we need not restrict ourselves to only legacy solutions. We can imagine all new ways of organizing.
All this talk of governments and creating a brighter future for humanity should help you envision how DAOs can work on a macroscopic level. For creating something greater than a mere geographically based solution. But they beauty of them is that they can also be applied to a microscopic level. Want to create a way your own family decides on what activities will you do next summer? Create a DAO and assign voting rights to each family member. Maybe your child has received phenomenal scores in school, and thus deserves more ability to affect your summer plans, so you increase their voting power. Now the same principle can be applied to another organization, say, your corporation. For example, with a DAO, if an employee has performed extremely well, you assign them more tokens with voting rights in the company and immediately they have more say in how the company is run.
With DAOs we can let our imaginations run wild. You’re able to get feedback for your marketing campaign. Incentivise good feedback by rewarding quality content. Have users vote on which feedback was the most valuable. And then implement the changes your community felt would make your organization even better.
The possibilities are endless.