A new form of organization: DAO

The rise of blockchain has promoted a paradigm shift in organizational structure and spawned a new form of organization—the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). DAO is a nonhierarchical organization that performs and records routine tasks on a peer-to-peer, cryptographically secure, public network and relies on the voluntary contributions of its internal stakeholders to operate, manage, and evolve the organization through a democratic consultation process.

Bitcoin represents the first implementation of a DAO, and it is the most established DAO to date. Since Bitcoin, there have been over 800 other DAOs created on the basis of a decentralized structure. Traditional online social communities are mainly based on centralized platforms and systems. The centralized structure leads to several significant problems, such as inequity between user contribution and revenue, fake news, leakage of user privacy, and unauthorised use of user-generated content. In order to solve the defects of centralized online communities, blockchain-based decentralized autonomous online communities (DAOCs) have been developed rapidly. DAOCs subvert the user participation mechanism in traditional communities, and no central entity has complete control over user-generated content and community management, which inevitably affects user participation behavior. Understanding and facilitating user active participation is critical for the success of both blockchain-based and traditional communities.