What and why DAOs?

Berlin Blockchain Week was a high quality event for builders, passionate insiders and established players. My personal focus was events and presentations (including my own) related to a new form of organising communities and companies on blockchain: decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). While DAOs are not new, the number of DAOs and the variety of DAO tools have grown a lot lately. DAOs can power anything from community engagement to taking important business decisions in a decentralised and trustless manner with the help of smart contracts governing some key aspects of that organisation. In simple terms, we can imagine a group of neighbours coming together with the goal to improve their neighbourhood, pooling funds and taking collective decisions on the usage of these funds (nice example by Michael Carter from WorkDAO) DAOs is can help to do this for virtual communities. I am personally very fascinated by empowering users and creating less centralised business entities in Web3.

My key takeaways:

- Starting off doesn’t have to be complicated. NFT-based Discord membership can be enough to launch a mini DAO to test things out and grow.

- DAO tools became much more usable over time with a lot of plug-and-play features allowing founders to come up with the perfect stack for their use case. However, like everywhere in crypto, UX remains a problem.

- Communication is one of the key challenges for continuous user engagement

- Voting on everything is too complex, time consuming and ineffective. Emerging systems of delegation is a way forward (also the question of delegate compensation)

- 1 token = 1 vote system is not working well and leads to centralisation and plutocracy. Many new approaches are tested including delegation.

- Traditional cooperatives are very useful models to study and adapt for DAO governance.

Great events co-hosted by Finoa, Gnosis , Bubbles , 1kx, Toucan Protocol, Celo, Anoma, www.regensunite.earth and many others!