Abstract

Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a new organizational form that exists solely on a blockchain. In a DAO, the rules of governance are hardcoded in a fully-transparent smart contract that executes on the blockchain. In these organizations there is no traditional hierarchical management structure, rather the organization exists as a group of token holders who have invested in the DAO by contributing to the DAO treasury and in return receive tokens that may increase (or decrease) in value and provide token holders with voting rights in the operations of the DAO. These voting rights are important since new initiatives within the DAO may take the form of proposals made by token holders which are then voted on by the group. In this way, DAOs exhibit an interesting form of organizational management and governance. We investigate how trust forms between DAO participants and how these relationships further the goals of DAOs.

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