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How to classify DAOs according to their mission? — Part 2: comparing DAO explorers

Marlene Marz
4 min readApr 9, 2023

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So far, several efforts have been to define the concept of DAOs, find common characteristics, and classify DAOs (e.g. Rikken et al., 2021 or Ziegler/Welpe, 2022). However, there is no comprehensive understanding of how DAOs could be characterized according to their mission. In fact, at least as many missions as DAOs exist.

Instead of developing a classification from a theoretical perspective, we rely on what existing classifications are dominant in the field. We, therefore, chose the approach to compare the DAO mission categories on different pages (“DAO explorers”). These are websites, where DAOs are listed, often with additional information or on-chain data (e.g., regarding governance). The DAOs either apply on the pages to be listed, added by the creators, or automatically via external data.

The category descriptions and tables in this article can be found here.

Comparing DAO explorers

To find the most common DAO missions, we compared the categories of five different DAO explorers and two articles:

Because The Generalist didn’t list DAOs, they don’t appear later in the comparison. The most DAOs listed in categories had Messari, followed by DeepDAO.

The number of unique DAOs per explorer (own illustration).

DeepDAO, Messari, and DAOcentral confirmed that they created the categories by themselves. On Messari, DAOs can suggest one or two categories and a couple of “tags”, when applying to be listed. On DeepDAO, DAOs are categorized manually. Therefore, just a small share of the whole dataset on the platform is categorized so far. DAOs are listed in up to four categories, while most DAOs remain with one or two. They created the categories in an iterative process of researching other classifications, classifying DAOs, and discussing the results, ending up with a total of 11 categories (see DeepDAO). We assume that the other explorers proceeded similarly.

DeepDAO DAOs per category (own illustration based on DeepDAO, 2023).

Merge similar categories

The frequency of the DAOs per category already gives an impression of the most represented missions. Between five and 12 categories were listed on the different explorers. To find the most common missions, we compared the categories from the different pages and grouped them.

The most common categories we found are colored, occurring on at least five of the seven analyzed sources. The categories left are listed below, with the ones in bold that occur more than one time. The underlined ones don’t have the same label but are assumed to be the same or very close, based on the similarity of the DAOs listed there and the corresponding category descriptions. This was the case in four categories: We put “NFT” into “collector”, “DeFi” into “protocol”, “DAO tool” into “service” and “greater good/political” into “social”.

We found seven common categories across the explorers:

Common categories per explorer (own illustration).

Then it was checked how many DAOs are listed in each category. Over all explorers, there is a total of about 1900 DAOs listed in the categories, and about 300 of them are listed in multiple categories on DeepDAO or Messari. Typically, larger DAOs appear on multiple pages, while smaller ones are just listed once. How many of them occur on multiple explorers would be a subject for further analysis, as well as how far the DAOs in the respective categories exactly correspond on the different pages.

Common categories and number of DAOs per explorer (own illustration).

The most frequent category by far is “protocol” DAOs, supporting the idea that DeFi protocols were an accelerating factor in the DAO ecosystem. The least frequent are “grants” and “media” DAOs, which are both small, yet distinct categories.

Illustration of common categories per explorer (own illustration).

In the next part, we want to analyze the different category descriptions and the characteristics of the common ones.

Other parts in this series:

Part 1: existing classifications
Part 3: compare descriptions
Part 4: conclusions

Sources:

Dao
Blockchain
Ethereum
Decentralization
Classification

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Marlene Marz

Written by Marlene Marz

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