Governance of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Abstract

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a fast-growing group of blockchain and smart contract-based applications. DAOs aim to serve new decentralized governance and organizational needs for various business purposes, ranging from decentralized exchanges such as UniSwap and theDAO, to R&D like VitADAO, managing infrastructures like Arbitrum, to charity funds like PactDAO. DAO projects have experienced an exponential growth over the past years. Although strongly rising in number, there is no clear consensus on what a DAO exactly entails. Additionally, despite this exponential growth, various DAO projects tend to pivot away from this form of governance or organization. They either experience a mismatch in the governance setup or the business objective, threatening their viability in the long-term. Also, as DAOs are built on blockchain infrastructure, this poses new governance challenges.
The goal of this thesis is to analyze how governance elements, business objectives and infrastructural choices can influence the long-term viability of DAOs. The main research objective of this PhD thesis is to:

“Develop a theory to explain how governance and infrastructure elements influence the long-term viability of decentralized autonomous organizations on public permissionless blockchains.”