Are DAOs the next wave?

Ourea Boundless Community (ID: ourea_community)

Ourea Boundless Community (ID: ourea_community)

, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

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What is DAO

Let's take a look at Wikipedia's definition of DAO:

The DAO's financial transaction records and procedural rules are kept on the blockchain. The exact legal status of such a commercial organization is unclear.

A famous example is The DAO, whose purpose was to fund venture capital, the organization launched a $150 million crowdsale in June 2016 and was immediately hacked and drained of $50 million of its currency. In the weeks that followed, the hack was reversed and the funds recovered via a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain. The bailout was achieved by Ethereum miners and clients switching to the new fork.

DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. For example, MakerDAO is also a DAO. Simply put, it is democratic self-government.

At the end of last year, we mentioned in OG-weekly that Pan Chao believes that the reason why DAO exists is because we need to pay high regulatory costs in cross-regional and border collaborations. When this regulatory cost is greater than organizational costs and transaction costs When the cost is low, we will seek DAO built on the blockchain for organization and collaboration.

Therefore, it can be considered that DAO is to reduce the collaboration cost of the organization.

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In January of this year, when I mentioned DAO at OG weekly, the title I gave was "DAO is interesting in theory, but there are still many years away from mainstream understanding or acceptance."

It was mentioned at the time:

It is unclear whether and when a group of decision makers can outperform a brilliant entrepreneur like CZ, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs in a business setting

This issue is indeed controversial. On the one hand, we believe that business has its own laws, such as the need for strong leadership or even special personality leadership and other personal charisma drives. But in DAO, its focus is not on this one, it focuses on the issues of rapid startup and efficient governance. Simply put, it is to solve the problem of efficient talent integration and wrangling in the process.

It seems that half a year is already a relatively long time for the blockchain. We have seen that relevant materials and communities of DAOs in China have been established one after another. I also formed a DAO out of curiosity. I think there will be more and more people pay attention.

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Simply put, getting started is easier.

Entrepreneurship first lacks people and then capital, but people come first, because people are the most expensive resource. It is much easier for everyone to jointly start an entrepreneurial organization by sharing rights and interests than to start it alone, and it will complement each other's resources in the first place.

The way of DAO is also a good way to screen people who have a common understanding of the concept of entrepreneurial projects together, and everyone's consensus and participation will be very good.

Of course, there are also new requirements for entrepreneurs, which means that our organizations need to have the concept of collaboration more often, which means that all decisions have become more transparent. This point is not immediately accepted by everyone at the beginning, and people still have some inertia to overcome.

Everyone cooperates with everyone. This is a relatively advanced collaboration method, and the requirements for people will also be raised to a new level.

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DAO and the Efficiency Controversy

I personally think that efficiency is still important. The form of entrepreneurship can be varied, but the essence still belongs to business. If it is business, it should follow the basic or general laws of business.

DAO reduces friction in currency and reduces friction in decision-making to improve efficiency. But the decision-making process is distributed after all. If the weight is absolutely average, is it efficient enough?

In other words, the result of the decision may be quick, but the quality of the decision may not be very good.

I also proposed a new idea in the community, which is to divide DAO into two parts, one part is the mechanism design part of DAO, and the other part is the business promotion part of DAO. Those who focus on the business part may not have the energy to focus on the first part or have enough energy to spare Insufficient, this allows people who focus on DAO mechanism design to provide specialized services, so that if they can effectively collaborate, the efficiency will be higher.

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Aragon is in a class of its own

Aragon is the world's most influential DAO solution provider. However, Aragon did not enter the Chinese market in the traditional way like most overseas projects, but adopted Typto's suggestion to build its oriental ecology in the form of a DAO. This is not a choice in terms of business logic, but thinking at the level of thinking and macro strategy. Therefore, Aragon China is endowed with the energy of great imagination.

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Is there a DAO or a product first?

We have talked about this topic before, and the conclusion is based on our own situation.

From an "authentic" point of view, first establish a DAO, and then organize everyone to do what they want to do. It seems that the name is justified.

Conversely, assuming that you already know a group of friends, have a prototype of a project, and want to increase the number of people or expand the scale, you can also start to set up a DAO on this basis.