Ask 10 totally different folks to outline a decentralized autonomous group (DAO), and also you’ll doubtless get 10 totally different definitions. However there’s no less than one factor most agree on: DAO governance is a large number. At finest, it’s an experiment within the works.
In line with DeepDAO, DAOs as we speak deal with a whopping $17.2 billion in worth. But many DAOs managing hundreds of thousands of {dollars} have confirmed hopeless at heeding even essentially the most primary of classes in enterprise administration 101. One doesn’t need to look too far within the annals of crypto historical past to recall main DAO catastrophes.
Recall Wonderland DAO, an Olympus fork that birthed arguably probably the most infamous scandals in DAO historical past. At its peak, Wonderland loved a close to $2 billion in complete worth locked, which got here to a skidding halt in January 2022 when its treasury supervisor — who glided by the pseudonym 0xSifu — turned out to be none aside from Michael Patryn, co-founder of the failed crypto alternate QuadrigaCX and a convicted legal for monetary fraud.
Or contemplate a newer exploit with the Solana-based buying and selling protocol Mango Markets. In October, attackers exploited the DAO’s loosely ruled parameters to accumulate a disproportionate chunk of the DAO’s MNGO tokens. In an absurd flip of occasions, the attacker proceeded to suggest on governance boards a proposal to return half their heist in alternate for the DAO to not prosecute him, then voted “Sure” on it with the stolen tokens. The vote finally failed, however Mango nonetheless ended up paying off $47 million to the attacker.
Case research of DAO failures are usually not unique to outrageous one-off spectacles like those above. Regardless of the Libertarian rhetoric of self-sovereignty and self-custody, dozens of DAOs that saved their monies on centralized exchanges additionally noticed their treasuries implode throughout the carnage of 2022’s blow-ups like FTX.
The reality is, DAO governance isn’t straightforward. Founders need to steadiness a mess of priorities, like fixing voter apathy, committing to decentralization and product market match. A “finest practices” handbook doesn’t exist, and the place there’s one, it’s not broadly shared.
The excellent news? Die-hard DAOists are laborious at work to rid these issues, one experiment at a time.
The issue of voter apathy
Take voter apathy, as an example, arguably DAO governance’s most widespread downside. As a “decentralized” group, tokenholders should vote in the event that they want resilient protocols. However token holders don’t vote as a result of it takes time. When voters do flip up on the voting sales space, or Snapshot, they lack the experience or context to make an knowledgeable choice. Worse nonetheless, voters who care could not even concentrate on a vote till it’s over.
To fight voter apathy, a burgeoning panorama of DAO infrastructure instruments has been creating instruments to streamline DAO voting into one-stop platforms. Merchandise equivalent to Senate and Goverland try to combination governance proposals throughout dozens of DAOs with direct integration on common voting platforms, equivalent to Snapshot and Tally.
Senate founder Paulo Fonseca tells Journal, “At current, it’s cumbersome for many DAOs to see off-chain and on-chain voting individually on totally different platforms. One among our product’s key value-adds is just for customers to eat all the data on one web page.”
As a result of governance proposals usually open to vote for a restricted length, Goverland, in flip, is placing a powerful emphasis on cell integration so voters are notified in time. “All of it begins with an in-time notification. With cell, it’s much more handy to assist enhance voter participation,” Goverland founder Andrey Scherbovich tells Journal.
Others consider that for DAO governance to enhance, it must transcend pure token-based voting based mostly on obligation. JokeRace, a voting protocol that goals to make governance “enjoyable,” was designed with this objective in thoughts.
As a substitute of anticipating 1000’s of tokenholders to vote, JokeRace is exploring the usage of incentivized “contests” that enable governors to gate voting proposals in any method potential by way of a extremely customizable allowlist, from a totally public discussion board to pick DAO contributors. Co-founder Sean McCaffery tells Journal:
“Many DAO tasks need to give non-financial utility to their token. What we’re doing is opening a horizon on high of straightforward token voting and incentivizing folks to carry tokens for extra than simply speculative causes.”
“For a extremely technical proposal that wishes to attract on the knowledge of consultants or loyal followers, a creator can gate the vote round standards, equivalent to minimal liquidity provision for 3 months or holders who’ve held the token for no less than a yr. It allows every little thing from low-commit enjoyable ‘GM contests’ to critical proposals the place solely energetic contributing DAO contributors can vote,” he provides.
In brief, JokeRace strives to reimagine governance proper all the way down to the underside social layer.
Delegate voting
To thwart low voter turnouts, DAOs are additionally turning to the true world of public governance for knowledge. One such tried-and-true methodology that has caught on prior to now yr is delegation, the place tokenholders entrust voting rights to delegated “politicians” or “stewards” who would vote on their behalf.
From a PR perspective, delegation is good in that DAOs get to have their cake and eat it, too. It permits the DAO to scale sooner with out having to move all selections by months of debate. DAOs additionally get to deflect the criticism of “inadequate decentralization” since tokenholders are technically expressing a demonstrated desire to vote, albeit not directly.
Most main DAOs as we speak have embraced delegation voting, and whereas it’s helped voter apathy to some extent, it’s hardly a silver bullet. Delegation voting in itself has surfaced with issues. For example, delegation can descend right into a reputation contest the place voters merely assign tokens to common Twitter influencers or acquainted firm names.
“An experiment that may very well be value attempting is to have delegates vote particularly on their area experience reasonably than making them chargeable for voting on each single DAO choice — which vary from complicated know-how to finance — too large of a spread for strong choice making,” Kate Beecroft, governance lead at Centrifuge, tells Journal.
Furthermore, delegate voting suffers from apathy in itself. Delegates themselves don’t flip up on election day. In line with Karma’s analysis, no less than 53% of delegates in main DAOs have did not even solid a single vote. Or it might result in conditions the place voting selections are the results of collusion made behind closed doorways for mutual political acquire.
For example, a16z famously delegates voting powers to “blockchain college golf equipment.” Whereas the enterprise fund claims that scholar golf equipment are “free to take part in governance nevertheless they see match,” it’s not instantly clear what the connection between these entities is.
Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki insists that delegating voting is a step ahead for DAO governance but additionally acknowledges its shortcomings. Gitcoin launched a reasonably egalitarian airdrop to round 25,500 holders in 2021, however its choice to include delegate voting noticed a focus of voting energy again into the fingers of solely about 100 delegates. On high of that, delegates cycle out and in of exercise over time, and even getting tokenholders to reallocate their delegation from inactive delegates each half a yr was tough.
“The issue that confronted us was retaining delegates engaged, accountable and slowly altering the DAO right into a liquid democracy of devoted Gitcoin group members that cared about our core imaginative and prescient of decentralized public funding,” Owocki states.
These issues are being acknowledged by builders within the DAO tooling, attempting to enhance delegate accountability. For instance, instruments like Karma have emerged to create transparency round delegation voting by aggregating all of the details about delegates, together with their voting weight, discussion board exercise and voting historical past, on one web page.
The DAOmeter dashboard, a DAO maturity ranking index by StableLab, additionally serves as a helpful DAO public good for assessing the decentralization journey of DAOs.
StableLab founder Gustav Arentoft tells Journal, “In the course of the bull market, a number of DeFi DAOs branding themselves as ‘decentralized finance’ suffered exploits as a result of they lacked even primary governance. The operational construction of those protocols was extraordinarily opaque. As a person, assessing the decentralization of DAOs was tough and requires some type of standardized parameters, which is what DAOmeter tries to supply.”
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In the end, regardless of the favored notion that DAOs are “autonomous,” the truth is that a lot of it might probably by no means be absolutely autonomous and enforceable on-chain.
“You possibly can have all of the on-chain votes you’d like, however a number of DAO operations come all the way down to the social layer. Who owns the GitHub account? Who controls the DNS [domain name system]? Who’s in-charge of handing over a password to the elected personnel?” says JokeRace’s McCaffery.
Development
Whereas DAOs wrestle to decentralize, many appear to overlook that they’re nonetheless essentially profit-oriented organizations. That implies that DAOs can’t afford to overlook about income and progress.
To scale, DAOs centralize some decision-making within the fingers of consultants. One stylish concept prior to now yr that DAOs have been experimenting with is “working teams.” In DAO nomenclature, in addition they go by subDAOs. Metropolis (beforehand Orca Protocol) calls them pods. Maker calls them core items, and Gitcoin calls them workstreams.
These constructions resemble the ever-present M-shaped organizational constructions in fashionable capitalism as we speak. Traditionally, the capitalist agency was a centralized U-shaped agency with decision-making energy concentrated within the fingers of some high executives. Because the agency expanded into regional markets, it grew more and more incapable of managing the quickly growing scope of complicated administrative selections.
To stay nimble and adapt because the agency grew, the fashionable capitalist agency underwent a structural decentralization, empowering mid-level managers with the autonomy to run the native department as they deem match. Pioneered by Common Motors president Alfred Sloan within the Twenties, this significant organizational innovation allowed companies to beat information issues and likewise aligned the incentives and rewards to decrease administration, successfully permitting them to work as “mini-entrepreneurs” inside a big company.
DAOs are witnessing the identical tendency towards the same organizational construction, besides that it’s evolving bottom-up from a dispersed, decentralized establishment.
James Waugh, co-founder of Hearth Eyes DAO, tells Journal, “In advising many DAOs, we generally suggest the setup of working teams to concentrate on sure areas which can be hypercritical, notably these involving technical work the place good contracts want well timed upgrading.”
“But it’s solely widespread for redundant working teams to exist and to be an entire waste of time, nevertheless. Whether or not or not they’re environment friendly actually will depend on the sorts of individuals in them.”
Decentralization maxis additionally complain that too many working teams and managerial consultants may imply much less transparency over how DAOs function. It’s a criticism that isn’t fully with out benefit.
“Within the early days of Bankless DAO, many inner mission managers requested for funds then delivered work of questionable worth. We applied quite a lot of options like reputational methods inside Discord, KPI-based funding and timelocks to discourage hire in search of,” Frogmonkee, an early core contributor of Bankless DAO, tells Journal.
In the end, DAO governance boils all the way down to the truth that DAOs are made up of a pluralistic archipelago of people with totally different worth preferences and priorities. Some want to pump their holdings within the short-term, whereas others have an interest within the long-term well being of the mission. Some are genuinely altruistic actors, after which there are delegates exchanging favors underneath the desk by agreeing to vote on one another’s proposals.
Twin governance constructions
In such a market of conflicting values, a transparent separation of powers may also help foil potential insider collusion. Some DAOs are actively experimenting with such “twin governance” fashions, equivalent to Optimism’s “Token Home” and “Citizen Home.” OP tokenholders and delegates occupy the previous, whereas the latter is an identity-based group of “residents” with soulbound tokens that acts as a verify and steadiness on the Token Home.
Shawn Grubb, a delegate at Gitcoin, tells Journal, “Optimism’s experiment with bicameral homes is a great approach to segregate the varied stakeholder teams: the tokenholders who care about pumping their luggage, the energetic contributors with a job, and the broader group who believes in Optimism and seeks mission funding. The hot button is balancing the facility of various stakeholder teams reasonably than the plutocratic establishment, the place plutocratic tokenholders reserve solely the facility.”
Optimism isn’t alone. In current months, a gaggle of Lido insiders have taken it upon themselves to push for the same dual-governance mannequin. The issue stems from Lido’s wildly profitable liquid staking product, stETH, which controls a market share of 32% staked ETH. This poses a looming risk to the underlying safety of the Ethereum layer 1, because it comes dangerously near the 33% consensus threshold, which might theoretically enable Lido to train management over Ethereum’s consensus layer. In June 2022, Lido DAO proved that self-regulation was not forthcoming after it unanimously shot down a vote to self-limit its stake move.
Lido’s proposed twin governance construction would, in principle, deliver the DAO again into alignment with the pursuits of the Ethereum protocol. That is finished by granting Lido customers (stETH holders) veto energy in opposition to the DAO, a function that competitor liquid staking protocol Yearn.finance has additionally applied.
“For Lido, twin governance (and implementing staking routers) needs to be its subsequent logical steps. It alleviates most of the present issues across the DAO,” stated Hasu on the Bell Curve podcast.
Discovering a steadiness
In sum, DAO governance isn’t straightforward. Driving progress whereas committing to decentralization isn’t any small feat, and it’ll take a few years earlier than governance reaches equilibrium.
But the philosophical rules that blockchain organizations embody — decentralization, transparency, egalitarianism — are all values very a lot value striving for. In any case, it’s unparalleled for a multimillion-dollar firm within the conventional enterprise world to be debating operational methods overtly on a discussion board or that permits anybody to enter and start contributing with out going by a tedious interview course of.
Even in its imperfect state, the open and clear context during which DAOs function is probably the largest bulwark in opposition to the centralization of energy.
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