DAO Basics

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization Story: Voting

The goal of this piece is to explain how members would operate in the DAO.

DAO (pronounced “DOW”) is at its core, an organization. An organization can be a club, a “guild,” a fraternity, a sorority, a PTO, a company, a charity, or an investment club. It is an organization — period.

A DAO is a “blockchain way” way to assemble, run and fund an organization and — in some cases — its operations. How (and why) that organization “assembles” is usually built into its initial structure and rules.

Rules are Rules

Not unlike the rules governing the Girl Scouts or a dinner club, there are also rules — as well as ways of getting things done in a DAO. “Rules” and “getting things done” are built into the DAO infrastructure. Those rules can be simple or very complex.

In the SBU DAO, rules dictate that every member can propose and vote on how to disburse funds from the main Treasury. Other rules ensure that — only if a member holds a specific ecosystem ERC 20 token — only they can also propose and vote on how funds from another Treasury that contain that token.

These rules are built into the programs that run the DAO; programs called “smart contracts.” These smart contracts are put into…