What are DAOs good for anyway?

At Utopia Labs, we spend a lot of time thinking about DAOs and the tradeoffs they make against traditional org frameworks. This "human coordination compass" is one way we're thinking about things. 🧵👇 https://i.imgur.com/BuS8vkn.png

Throughout history, humans have centralized decision-making into the hands of a few individuals. Most governments, corporations, and non-profits are examples of this, and belong somewhere in the top-left quadrant of our compass.

Centralizing power to a board of directors (or trustees or parliament or congress etc) enables organizations to move much more quickly and effectively toward their mission. The tradeoff, of course, is that centralization also enables waste, fraud, and abuse.

It becomes clear when we plot these org structures on our compass that the holy grail of human coordination lives in the upper-right quadrant. https://i.imgur.com/zX09biR.png

Many biological systems that have evolved as decentralized networks w/out compromising on effectiveness– per Metadreamer's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqDpm-SH0ZY. Human coordination frameworks, however, have yet to achieve this utopia. https://i.imgur.com/6sDXIYs.png

The next generation of DAO tooling will empower DAOs to compete in effectiveness with centralized entities w/out compromising on decentralization. This is what we're working toward at Utopia Labs, alongside many other DAO startups and builders. https://i.imgur.com/9XWsoL6.png

Sidenote: Utopia is hiring for Data Scientist and Senior Software Engineer roles. Hmu if interested!

https://jobs.lever.co/UtopiaLabs/9762d1ba-a664-45e9-889e-6a389e52e01b

https://jobs.lever.co/UtopiaLabs/9762d1ba-a664-45e9-889e-6a389e52e01b

Smart contracts and blockchain-based governance have enabled entirely new mechanisms for decentralized coordination that dramatically reduces (and even eliminates) the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse. Right now, DAOs trade effectiveness for decentralization.