Field Study: DAOs and Tools for DAOs

Authors: Aubrie Pagano and Alejandro Safdie

Our exploration into decentralized autonomous organizations, on-chain organizations, and the tooling that powers them

As DAOs emerge, what does the future hold?

Web3 has given us a lot to talk about over the past couple of years. One of the hottest topics to occupy media and popular mindshare was Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs, as they’re commonly referred to. These types of organizations have been present in Web3 for years, but most individuals started to see their potential in November 2021 after a group of internet enthusiasts set up a DAO, raised more than $40M in a week and almost bought one of the 13 original copies of the US constitution (read more about the story of ConstitutionDAO here).

DAOs have proliferated exponentially over the past five years and are starting to occupy a central role in Web3 activity despite having started off on the wrong foot (read more here about The DAO, which raised $150M and got hacked 2 months after its inception). The exact number of active DAOs isn’t clear, but current estimates go as high as 5,000 organizations. It is safe to say there are at least 1000 active DAOs, up from <10 in 2017.

As of September 2022, these DAOs held a total of over $10B in assets under management (AUM), a number which has increased more than twenty-fold since January 2021…