01-31, 11:45–12:05 (Europe/Zurich), Beacon Stage
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.
In this talk, we present our ongoing research around digital democracy in DAOs and give context on recent issues and trends. We review the history of voting in DAOs – from expensive voting on mainnet, UX issues, voter fatigue and the failure of DAO platforms to the emergence of modular DAO infrastructure, incentive problems and issues with delegation. Based on examples (Optimism, Sky/MakerDAO, EigenLayer), we present some state-of-the-art governance frameworks, evaluate to what extent they are actually democratic and invite the audience to join the discussion.
