For the past decade, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have been explored and experimented with, risen and fallen many times. The term “DAO” itself remains subject to various interpretations, from on-chain governance to Discord-administrated organisations (“DAOs”) and DAOs-in-name-only (DINOs). The rich variety of DAOs across L2s, DeFi, NFTs, ReFi, DeSci and many other (sub-)ecosystems resulted in a vast natural experiment of people coordinating around these decentralised technologies, allowing us to observe the emergence of governance within a new system during a relatively short time frame. Based on about ten years of research on blockchain, we conduct a literature review on digital democracy in DAOs, shedding light on typical mechanisms and common challenges. In this talk, we will present our approach, preliminary findings and put them into perspective from insights we got along the way as well as observations from our daily work in the DAO space.