A Survey on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and Their Governance

Abstract

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs are organizations governed by a set of pre-defined rules programmed as source code in smart contracts. Once implemented, a DAO can automatically execute tasks, coordinate, and facilitate decentralized decision-making, without any central authority. This new and emerging paradigm is still under development and has not been researched much until today. To our knowledge the literature still lacks a comprehensive survey discussing DAOs and DAO governance. We conduct a systematic review of common characteristics, a DAO categorization, real-world DAO applications, DAO governance including voting schemes and dispute resolution mechanisms in DAOs to provide an initial overview. We anticipate that our work can provide useful insights and references for researchers and industrial practitioners who wish to delve deeper into this nascent area.

Keywords: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), DAO Governance, Voting scheme, Dispute Resolution

JEL Classification: G34, O16, D23, D72, J52