What are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO)?

One of the most important features of digital currencies is that they are decentralized.

As blockchain technology becomes more widely accepted throughout the world, a new sort of organization has developed. DAO is a decentralized organization that uses blockchain-based smart contracts to administer its operations. Furthermore, the fundamental goal is to allow a wide society of users to engage in its administration and future growth.

Decentralized applications (dApps) are fundamental components of DAO operations. DApps are software products that were produced with the help of smart contracts. DAOs are, in general, a collection of decentralized programs.

Even though some apps were developed to do money management operations, DAOs are developed to serve as a decentralized platform for communal decision-making. DAOs function as a result of several smart contracts that allow participants to take an equal part in the decision-making processes inside the organization.

Decisions made by the community of stakeholders include how the company will use funding and resources. In order for the plans and rules of the organization to be accepted, a percentage of the community needs to be in a consensus.

The idea behind decentralized autonomous organization was to leave-out human mistakes or manipulation of investor funds by giving control to the automated system and crowdsourced process to make decisions.

Supported by Ethereum, the DAO was developed to give the opportunity to investors to send money from anywhere in the world anonymously. After that, DAO offers those owners tokens, allowing them to vote on upcoming projects.

Originally, Bitcoin was seen as the very first project to almost become a DAO. Nevertheless, when the Ethereum blockchain was first released to the public, having all of the smart contract qualifications, DAOs began to grow and almost reach the most important goal of absolute transparency and community governance.

In addition, it is essential to know that as open-source software, DAOs can be targeted by hackers and manipulated.

In June of 2018, a group of hackers attacked an organization called “The DAO” and targeted their security vulnerabilities. The malicious actors gained access to 3.6 million ETH, which was approximately $50 million at the time. This provoked a debate among DAO investors on how to address the hack.

Decentralized autonomous organizations are designed to be completely transparent, allowing all shareholders and the DAO community to observe all financial actions done by the corporation. The DAO's smart contract and accompanying code are likewise open to the public.

This high level of transparency is critical to the DAO idea. The aim of a DAO, like the underlying principle behind cryptocurrencies, is to go beyond the typical centralized administration of an organization and build a totally transparent company whose acts and finances are completely visible.