Keynote Speech 2: An overview of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations in the blockchain

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Blockchain technology has enabled a new kind of distributed system. It has also allowed the emergence of novel new ways of governance and coordination. The most relevant of these are the socalled Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). DAOs typically implement decision-making systems to make it possible for their online community to reach agreements. As a result of these agreements, the DAO operates automatically by executing the appropriate portion of code on the blockchain network (e.g., hire people, delivers payments, invests in financial products, etc). In the last few years, several platforms such as Aragon, DAOstack and DAOhaus, have emerged to facilitate the creation of DAOs. As a result, hundreds of new organizations have appeared, with their communities interacting mediated by blockchain. However, academia has yet to appropriately explore empirically this phenomenon. In this talk, we aim to shed light on the state of the DAO ecosystem. For doing so, we will review the three main platforms that facilitate the creation and management of DAOs nowadays: Aragon, DAOstack and DAOhaus. We will introduce their main similarities and differences, compare their adoption and how they are evolving. We will also review some statistics about the DAOs that these platforms host. This overview will also help us to understand which kind of communities are populating the blockchain and what are the similarities and differences with other online communities.