WTD(AO)!!
Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, and now DAO!!
The Web3 wagon just keeps on giving new acronyms!
Well for some these are much more than that.
Today will take a look at DAOs - Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
Now I can quote many famous, complex definitions to explain what a DAO is, but we will go with this line we heard during our research calls,
“A DAO is a Whatsapp group with a bank account” - Doesn’t make sense? It will by the time you are done reading this newsletter.
Let’s look at Peter Yang’s approach to defining DAOs
Duration: 2 min read
Read here:
The DAO Ecosystem
Linda Xie details out the current use cases of DAOs, which are some of the popular DAOs and what the future might look like.
Duration: 8 min read
Read here: bit.ly/curio-revelio-3CQ8EZ6
The Dark Side of DAOs
Like all new concepts DAO has faced it own share of problems starting with a hack of the OG DAO, ‘The DAO‘ which led to $60 million worth of Ethereum being stolen!
Look, the DAO space are still early so there will be mistakes and experiments, but that is needed to improve the concept.
DAOs are supposed to make collaboration human-free, but that will take time. The backbone of DAOs is smart contracts and who designs these contracts?!
Humans.
Regulations is another dark grey area for DAOs as governments will take time to catch-up with the development of DAOs and the crypto world.
But the same doubts and questions were raised for Bitcoin and NFTs, and now we have multi-billion dollar startups in the crypto investment space and NFTs selling for $7+ million!
I guess anything is possible!
Just D(A)O It: Curio Revelio’s Take
What do DAOs offer?
Ownership: DAOs distribute ownership to various players in the ecosystem not just the investors and founders.
Organization: Incentivizing a large community to work towards a common goal is really tough. Imagine the scale to be 100, 500 or even 1000!
DAOs enforce this through tokens and other tools as well.Transparency: Contrary to how private corporations operate, DAOs thrive on transparency. Backed by the blockchain DAOs not only build in public, they communicate, onboard, transact, and govern in public.
It is still early days for DAOs but it shaping up to be a different world than what we are used to:
DAO members are collaborating across countries and time zones just on chat (thanks to smart contracts), which a lot of large companies are struggling with
Anyone can join a DAO and start contributing and get paid/rewarded
All transactions and collaborations are visible to all members (remember blockchain?!)
‘Proof of Work’ is the metric of qualification rather than connections, facetime with leadership, or straight up privilege
As the workforce realizes these benefits of working in (or is it ‘for’) a DAO more people will start experimenting with DAOs.
We will be keeping a close eye on DAOs (probably join one too!)
Who knows, DAOs just might turn out to be the future of work or probably nothing!