DAOs & Decentralized Governance

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is a set of smart contracts that encode governance rules for a shared treasury. That is the whole definition.

Decentralized governance does not exist in a vacuum. It exists inside legal systems that predate it by centuries — systems that do not recognize smart

We build governance systems hoping for good faith. We design them assuming participants want the protocol to thrive, that voters will read the proposa

We owe it to the reader to be direct about the limits of prediction. The history of technology forecasting is a history of getting the magnitude right

The conversation about DAOs tends to collapse into advocacy or dismissal. Either decentralized governance is the future of human coordination and trad

Every system reveals its true architecture under stress. In traditional organizations, failure exposes bad management, misaligned incentives, or struc

The best argument for decentralized governance is not theory. It is the handful of DAOs that have governed real treasuries, survived real crises, and

A treasury is the material expression of collective sovereignty. In a traditional organization, the treasury is governed by a board, audited by accoun

The dominant governance model in decentralized organizations is token-weighted voting: one token, one vote. It is the simplest mechanism, the most wid

Token-weighted voting is the default, but it is not the only option. Over the past several years, a generation of mechanism designers — drawing on eco