Paper Number
1056
Paper Type
Complete Research Paper
Abstract
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are multifunctional systems that mediate transactions between humans and blockchains or operate entirely autonomously. While considerable attention has been given to their organizational structure, their characteristics as online communities remain largely unexplored. This study aims to fill this research gap by analyzing a dataset comprising 31,002 DAOs, 220,960 proposals, 51,987,413 votes, 154,087,070 token ownerships, and 46,695 historical governance token prices. The research addresses several key aspects. First, it confirms the presence of the 90-9-1 rule. Second, it highlights the unequal distribution of voting power through a deciding voter analysis. Third, it validates the scale-free network properties by fitting a power-law function to the degree distribution of DAO memberships and proposal participation suggesting the existence of influential nodes within the network. Last, the study indicates that the diffusion of information is uninfluenced by the level of connectedness among voters, as determined by their shared memberships in DAOs.
Recommended Citation
Ziegler, Christian; Praski, Marcin; Fadeev, Dmitry; Wagner, Thomas; and Matout, Hassan, "A Network Analysis of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" (2024). ECIS 2024 Proceedings. 8.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2024/track16_fintech/track16_fintech/8
A Network Analysis of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are multifunctional systems that mediate transactions between humans and blockchains or operate entirely autonomously. While considerable attention has been given to their organizational structure, their characteristics as online communities remain largely unexplored. This study aims to fill this research gap by analyzing a dataset comprising 31,002 DAOs, 220,960 proposals, 51,987,413 votes, 154,087,070 token ownerships, and 46,695 historical governance token prices. The research addresses several key aspects. First, it confirms the presence of the 90-9-1 rule. Second, it highlights the unequal distribution of voting power through a deciding voter analysis. Third, it validates the scale-free network properties by fitting a power-law function to the degree distribution of DAO memberships and proposal participation suggesting the existence of influential nodes within the network. Last, the study indicates that the diffusion of information is uninfluenced by the level of connectedness among voters, as determined by their shared memberships in DAOs.
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