MixMarvel: What is DAO?
Blockchain technology has been gradually adopted in a wide range of application scenarios. Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), an application of blockchain in governance, has been developing rapidly and generated heated discussions.
Some believe that DAO will play an important role in the future society with its decentralized way of governance and that it has evolved into a model, raising new governance issues that are ignored by traditional blockchains.
Some may doubt DAO is a new business model rather than a venture capital in disguise. Is this truly the case? We might as well dig into what DAO really is in the first place.
Definition of DAO
So, what is DAO? Can we rightly define it? We may try with the definition from two perspectives.
DAO in Vision
Ideally speaking, DAO can operate independently without any central authority or management hierarchy, which is manifested in DAO’s ability to develop its functionality through the use of artificial intelligence or the collective management of human participants.
This vision is in line with the principle of sharing economy or the theory of shared resource, and there is a potential to shift the current power structure from centralized corporations to groups of users who form system functions and governance rules on their own. It allows a second thought on ownership and autonomy through decentralized coordination mechanisms. And a new model of sociality as such is likely to contribute to a transparent, efficient, fair, and democratic order.
However, this vision of a future democratic governance structure was shattered in 2016, when millions of dollars worth of Ethereum tokens were hacked from DAO-funded projects, and the Ethereum authority, numerous cryptocurrency exchanges leaderships, and informal technical leaders immediately stepped in and closed the “exit” of exchanges to fight back.
It is therefore argued that the world is not yet ready for DAO and that human sociality emerges whenever humans are involved. In other words, whenever urgent and complex situations arise, the leadership will come up front and tackle the crisis with management instruments. Hence this ideal vision of DAO may only be a utopian idealistic society.
DAO in Practice
The concept of DAO in practice, on the other hand, was originally proposed by Jentzsch, the founder of Slock IT, in 2016 in the form of a white paper. DAO was described as a software-based decentralized organization connecting all parties (including shareholders and all stakeholders) and facilitating trusted transactions, with fund incentives based on tokens.
In short, DAO is designed to allow investors in cryptocurrencies to directly fund and manage new ventures and relies on dApps to develop smart contracts that can be used to authenticate ownership, transaction, status, and conditional rules. This indicates a major innovation in the business model and the idea of sharing economy, which is manifested in decentralized power and DAO being deemed as smart contracts of an open-source project.
Following this trace, DAO can be a decentralized, crowdfunded, directly managed (or indirectly democratic) organization and investment platform, which is the positioning of most DAO projects at present. Most DAOs differentiate from each other by offering slightly different functionality, market verticals, and governance structures.
Practice of MixMarvel
The practical definition of DAO is rather similar to the MixMarvel DAO Venture project officially launched by MixMarvel on April 7, 2022. MixMarvel DAO Venture is an attempt at a financing platform that also provides all-around incubation and consulting services covering blockchain, Web3 Engine, infrastructures, and applications.
MixMarvel DAO Venture raises funds from the industry through centralized management and uses these funds to actively discover potential Web2 projects and teams. So far, it has invested in 6 high-quality projects covering blockchain games, Metaverse, Web3 Engine, and infrastructures.
Christoph Jentzsch describes the vision of DAO economics as a very large joint bank account. In the MixMarvel DAO project, a decentralized digital jurisdiction for companies, communities, and organizations can be set up, and MixMarvel users can create diverse community content.
About MixMarvel
MixMarvel is the world’s leading blockchain content-incubation platform and creators community. By in-depth exploring the open world and integrating world-renowned IP with high-quality content, MixMarvel connects investors and mass users through asset distribution, content publication, DeFi tools, infrastructure, community co-creation, and other diversified scenarios in a new ecosystem of dapps. Its ecosystem comprises a broad portfolio of FT/NFT assets, including the MIX, RPG, and HEROES tokens; blockchain content including the GameFi application DeHero; and infrastructures including Rangers Protocol and MixMarvel SDK. For more information, visit https://linktr.ee/MIXMARVEL.
