The Decentralized

Autonomous
Organization and
Governance Issues

19th March, 20221

Usman W. Chohan, MBA, PhD

Discussion Paper Series:

Notes on the 21st Century

Abstract: The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) represents an innovation in

the design of organizations, in its emphasis on computerized rules and contracts, but the
DAO’s structures and functions also raise issues of governance. This discussion paper
enumerates those issues, so as to encourage further research on DAOs and governance.

1
Original version prepared on 4th December, 2017

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Note on the new edition

It seemed something of a marginal exploration in 2017, that I sought to examine the
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) as a digital structure for the execution of
preset protocols, proceeding from the innovations of blockchain technology to situate a
technology in the contractual sphere. Yet in the time that has elapsed since that paper, it has
become supremely evident that there is a deep intellectual and practitioner interest in
developing the notion of DAOs more forcefully and towards a variety of end uses. In other
words, by itself, the DAO may not seem to be a very captivating notion at the face of it.
However, upon deeper inquiry into the notion of the contractual basis of technological
progress, with the decentralization and autonomization of technology to build an
architecture that co-governs society, there is enormous promise in further exploration.This
was reflected, above all, in the views, downloads, and citations that the previous edition of
this paper received.
I myself used this concept as the linchpin of my third book, where the DAO was framed as
“government by algorithm” or as “the bureaucrat as algorithm,” which was an almost wild
proposition at first glance, but one whose philosophical appeal in the 21st century is
captivating. DAOs are a technological movement towards 21st century organizational design
(van Rijminam et al., 2018) , intended to fit new sociotechnological arrangements befitting a
new era of society, some might say. But its challenges, as the previous version of this paper
contended, are not too different at the fundamental level from challenges of governance
that speak to any time and any place: accountability, oversight, participation, and stability.
This is where perhaps the greatest value of the previous version of this paper lay: it situated
a science question in a social science context - technological innovations that speak to
social structures must keep both of them in mind. Although there has been breakneck
development in the domain of blockchains over the past decade, the problems that they
seek to solve, and the ones that they confront while attempting to solve them, are in some
ways very reminiscent of those that predate their introduction. This is no less true for DAOs,
whose definitional ambiguity still rests, and whose legal status has not received direct or
explicit regulatory attention at a sufficiently international scale (Pranata and Tehrani, 2022).
As such, this version of the paper, like its predecessor, speaks to a timely and yet timeless
set of questions, and the paper can hardly do justice to their gravity or complexity. For the
record, and as with a disclaimer put on other revised papers, I do not own and never have
owned tokens, coins, or other assets in the cryptocurrency or DAO categories. This is not
due to any lack of confidence in the space, far from it, but rather that non-ownership affords
me the sufficient intellectual distance from the technologies to be able to engage with them
dispassionately. I am agnostic as to the success and value of DAO and other blockchain
instruments, and even if they are all hacked (as the original DAO was), I retain my interest in

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the technology and in the socioeconomic & sociotechnological prospects and impacts of
such innovations.
On that point, it has been encouraging to see such a widespread interest in the development
of DAOs, and it seems that such interest is unlikely to wane, despite the challenges that the
space has confronted since its launch as a subfield. Indeed, DAOs have come to influence
what are ultimately likely to be larger categories of economic import such as decentralized
apps (dApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) (Wronka, 2021; Ushita and Angel, 2021). As
such, it is with a sense of continuity in that interest that this version of the paper is released
to the public.

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Table of Contents
Note on the new edition 1

Introduction 5

The DAO and other examples 6

Governance Issues at DAOs 9

Figure 1: DAO Governance Issues 10

References 14

Also in this series available on SSRN 16

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The Decentralized Autonomous

Organization and Governance Issues
Introduction
The world of blockchains has expanded to cover a remarkable level of diverse uses, some of
which are well-removed from the original intentions of distributed-ledger financial-token
technologies. One of the most interesting, as the citations and downloads of this paper
reflect,2 is the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). DAOs represent
an innovation in the design of organizations in their emphasis on computerized rules and
contracts in an age of blockchain technology and cryptoanarchist decentralized structures,
with member-owned communities and consensus-based management at the helm that are
immunized from and absolved of centralizing structural forces (Ozercan et al., 2018; Bellini
et al., 2020; Willrich et al., 2019; Maciel, 2020; Chatterjee et al., 2019a-b; Ciatto et al., 2018).
Building upon blockchain technology’s precepts for transparency and participation in the
virtual realm (Li et al., 2021; Tse, 2020), DAOs have already influenced newer technological
categories such as decentralized apps (dApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) (see Ushita
and Angel, 2021).
But just what is a DAO? For the purposes of definition, a DAO3, is an organization that is run
through rules encoded as computer programs called “smart contracts.” 4 In other words, it is
“governance” by pre-programmed algorithms that are executed by computers based on
code. To modify the code, consensus among users is required to edit the pre-programmed
running protocols of the DAO (Dwivedi et al., 2021). The relationship with blockchain
technology, from which DAOs emanate, is that a DAO's financial transaction record and
programmed rules are maintained on a blockchain, which ostensibly increases transparency
dramatically but at the expense of security.
However, the DAO’s structures and functions also raise issues of governance that also
require urgent academic and practitioner attention, particularly since (1) DAOs are still
considered entities that are somewhat ineffable or at the very least difficult to describe, and

2
The earliest version of this paper was written in 2017
3
DAOs are also called decentralized autonomous corporation (DACs)
4
One important critique of the term “smart contracts” which should be highlighted at this early juncture is that
they are neither “smart” nor “contracts” as these terms would typically be understood. The smartness is absent
in that the protocols still require remedial human intervention and only mechanically execute what they are
pre-programmed to do. The contract portion is absent because the legal definition of a contract as binding
agreement is not the same as input protocols of an algorithm (Pranata and Tehrani, 2022).

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(2) the precise legal status of the DAO organizational-type is yet indeterminate but has
received negative rulings in some cases. For the former point, the descriptive ambiguity
may last for much longer as newer forms develop that might be subsumed within the larger
category of DAO. For the latter point, regulatory and legal approaches, at the international
level, are subject to change and are unlikely to be given unified treatment given the
specialized nature of DAOs even within the blockchain space - varied “digisprudence” as
Diver puts it (2021).
Early working examples of the DAO concept have existed since the mid-2010s, but they
have come under various forms of attacks, not to mention salient user criticisms.
Nevertheless, they continue to garner fervent support from users who argue for more
decentralized, autonomous, technologically-driven solutions to the design of virtual-centric
organizations in the 21st century (Ellul and Pace, 2019). This reflects the contention that, as
societies adopt a greater reliance on virtual modes of structuration, then organizational
designs must come to reflect and facilitate this virtualization tendency, and this too for the
benefit of users (Neiheiser et al., 2018; van Rijminam et al., 2018; Moseley et al., 2020). By
this account, current organizational structures may be outmoded for certain purposes, and
newer adaptive technologies (above all, the blockchain) may help to address changing
requirements of organizational design in contemporary environments (Dwivedi et al., 2021) .
This assumes, nevertheless, that the claim of being outmoded is indeed true, and also that
blockchain is the appropriate technological foundation for fostering changes. These are
contested claims to say the least, and the track record for solutions provided in the form of
DAOs thus far has remained wanting, particularly as their vulnerabilities have been
uncovered and their management has run into various obstacles. Nevertheless, at least in
the abstract, there are notable advantages & disadvantages to relegating management to
pre-programmed rules, where transparency and efficiency are marked positives, but
security, ownership, and flexibility are marked disadvantages. This suggests that trade-offs
are a continuing feature in the substitutive proposition of DAOs, and the relative merits may
change over time, but stand as of this writing.
Given these rudimentary elements of DAO function and purpose, it is worth highlighting the
governance elements of DAOs after covering certain salient features. As such, the structure
of the remainder of the paper is as follows. First, it discusses the original DAO and other
pertinent examples as they have emerged in the age of the blockchain, without limiting the
scope of their forward-looking evolutionary possibilities. Second, the true substance of this
paper is presented in the discussion of governance issues, noting that some elements are
veritably timeless in their governance salience, while others are rooted in more
contemporaneous design. Concluding remarks are presented thereafter.

The DAO and other examples

Following the original popularization of blockchain in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the
notion of decentralized autonomous organizations rose to greater attention in the

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mid-2010s with the introduction of the original DAO in 2016.5 The original DAO was intended
as an investor-driven venture capital fund, which would disburse funds based on voting
patterns of “investors,” based on proposals that would be submitted by participant
“contractors” and vetted by nominated “curators.” It would not be a vehicle for holding
money per se, but rather would serve as a democratically-structured and transparent virtual
platform for competition among proposals made by contractors. It would not have a physical
address nor formal managerial roles. Given the inherent appeal of such a transparent and
participatory design, available for ready and open audit through a blockchain-based (ether)
foundation, it was at its launch one of the largest crowdfunded campaigns ever seen.
However, its governance and security issues are worth particular attention because, when it
was launched with $150 million in crowdfunding in June 2016, with smart contract
implementation through the technology of Ethereum, the DAO was instantaneously hacked
and drained of US$50 million in cryptocurrency. This suggested that there was a mismatch
between the ostensible appeal of an open and participatory system and the nefarious
desires of bad apples to sabotage the system at its inception. The hack on the DAO was
nullified the subsequent month, and the money was restored through a hard fork
intercession of the Ethereum blockchain. This bailout was orchestrated by a majority vote of
the blockchain's hash rate. However, despite the financial restitution, there was considerable
reputational damage from this initial attack which lingers on to this day,.
Yet one mustn’t necessarily conflate the original DAO with DAOs as a broader category of
smart-contract based technologies (Ellul and Pace, 2019), and this wider category includes
other important and well-known examples such as Dash governance (see also Mosley et al.,
2020),6 Digix.io.7, Augur,8 Steem,9 Uniswap,10 and ConstitutionDAO, as of this writing.
Meanwhile, newer offerings are readily being conceived given the dynamic nature of the
space. Some of these focus on mandates that are similar to cryptocurrencies given that they
issue coins (Dash governance and Digix.io), while others offer hedging instruments (Augur
and Digix.io), market-making capabilities (Uniswap), collectibles (ConstitutionDAO), and even
social media-based content platforms (Steem). Many of these offerings are therefore
centered around the evolution of blockchain-based assets and digital variants of existing
socioeconomic instruments (insurance, exchange markets, social media), but the ambitions
of DAOs as organizations run on pre-programmed protocols is undoubtedly much greater, as
I have argued in the case of public administration at large, and so have other scholars
(Neiheiser et al., 2020; Myeong and Jung, 2019; Barbosa et al., 2018).

5
The difference between DAOs in general and the original DAO is that the latter is a specific (and defunct)
example of the former, and is thus referred to throughout this paper as “the original DAO.”
6
Dash governance has a coin and falls more closely within the cryptocurrency space.
7
Digix.io is a smart-asset gold-focused coin that seeks to match its value with the price of physical gold.
8
Augur centers around the prediction markets and betting arenas, including sports and other domains where
financial options and insurance markets can be developed.
9
Steem is a social media and content-driven platform which rewards creators and curators with “steem tokens”
as perceived by the content audience
10
Uniswap is a cryptocurrency exchange whose processes are based on smart contracts

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But as is noted above, public administration has not been the primary focus of such efforts,
despite arguments in their favor (Neiheiser et al., 2020; Myeong and Jung, 2019; Barbosa et
al., 2018), and projects thus far have worked within the limited margins of smaller-scale
private capital allocation (see also Trisetyarso et al., 2019). Some scholars see DAO-type11
usages in areas with sensitive data (such as genomics, see Ozercan et al., 2018), or just data
with great value (Li et al., 2021) while others see usage in reputational based systems12
(Bellini et al., 2020). They are at times projected as more efficient and economically
sustainable approaches (Willrich et al., 2019) to be applied in the management of larger
material architectures (Maciel, 2020). Although smart contracts themselves are, at the
present stage, deterministic and non-probabilistic (Chatterjee et al., 2019a), they might be
adapted towards new paradigms through programming refinements (Chatterjee et al.,
2019b), where a great deal depends on the refining of programming logic (Ciatto et al.,
2018).
Nevertheless, it needn’t be the case that DAOs are only applied to small-scale private
systems of capital allocation;13 the ambition can and should be much wider (Myeong and
Jung, 2019). Yet although it is still considered difficult to describe as an organizational type
(Trisetyarso et al., 2019; Tse, 2020), the conceptual basis of a DAO has been typologized by
an underlying ability of blockchain technology to provide a secure digital ledger that tracks
financial interactions across the internet and is bolstered against forgery by a method
known as trusted timestamping and by dissemination of a distributed database.
The advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the need to involve a bilaterally
accepted (trustee-oriented) 3rd-party in a financial transaction, which simplifies the
sequence. From a financial standpoint, such a process reduces the costs associated with a
blockchain-enabled transaction by ensuring the availability of the associated data, and this
is because of the elimination of both the trusted third party, as well as the elimination of the
need for continual recording of contract exchanges in different records. Extending this logic
outwards, if regulatory authorities allowed it, blockchain data could supplant the need for
public documents related to the governance and accountability associated with rights to
ownership as are normally assigned by titles and deeds. This is because a blockchain
approach would allow multiple cloud-computing users to forge a loosely formed
peer-to-peer smart contract collaboration (Tse, 2020).
A further extension of the logic of the DAO, along cryptoanarchist principles, is that DAOs
may be constructed in a manner that allows function without human managerial
interactivity, so long as the underlying smart contracts are made robust and substantiated
by Turing-complete mechanisms. Since cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum can meet the
Turing threshold, the DAO’s autonomous functionality can be enabled. It is worth noting that
there is a strong connection between DAOs and cryptoanarchist thought, because a well-run
11
Here DAO-type can be seen to mean “smart-contract reliant”
12
Steem’s token awards would also reflect this
13
A discussion of the Marxian critique of private organizations is presented in a later section, since it resonates
with the democratic and participatory elements that are not allowed to flourish in private top-down systems,
which then works against the cryptoanarchist motivations of decentralizing empowerment.

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DAO should serve as a transparent platform wherein individuals can still maintain control
over their personal data and their identities (Soltani et al., 2021). This was the spirit in which
the original DAO was conceived, and it is reflected in various newer ideas (market making,
cryptocurrency variants). But it isn’t necessary for anonymity to be a function of a
well-curated DAO idea; at times it is the smart contract’s appeal which prevails upon the
crypto-element.
The precise legal status of this type of business organization is generally unclear (Pranata
and Tehrani, 2022), and may vary by jurisdiction. A ruling by the SEC in 2017 was adverse and
found that the DAO may constitute an illegal offer of unregistered securities. Nevertheless,
in 2021 Wyoming became the first US state to recognize DAOs as a legal entity, and
CryptoFed DAO became the first business entity recognized as such. Although often of
uncertain legal standing (Pranata and Tehrani, 2022; Tse 2020), a DAO may functionally be a
corporation without legal status as a corporation: which is commonly and legally referred to
as a general partnership. This partnership model may allow for acceptance from a regulatory
standpoint; but still, any known participants or those at the interface between a DAO and
traditional (regulated) financial systems, may be subject to prosecutorial measures by
regulators if they violate various laws.
As such, DAOs tread a much more sensitive path than even cryptocurrencies in jurisdictions
that might otherwise be favorably disposed towards blockchain-based innovations, such as
the United States. For example, securities, commodities, and taxation laws are carefully
applied to major cryptocurrencies (SEC, CFTC and IRS being the enforcement authorities),
but with DAOs, it is the complexity of organizational design oversight that has led them to
receive at best a lukewarm response. From this then, one might surmise that differentiation
between the wider purpose of DAOs and other blockchain technologies has been inferred by
regulators (digisprudence as per Diver, 2021), and this would make sense given that more
recent concepts such as dApps and DeFi (Ushita and Angel, 2021; Wronka, 2021) bring much
larger risks than mainstay cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ether) would. Yet the more
troubling basis for looking at governance in DAOs is in conundrums that have yet to be
resolved, as is discussed in the following section.

Governance Issues at DAOs

What might be left underexamined, in terms of organizational design in decentralized virtual
systems (Ellul and Pace, 2019; van Rijmenam et al., 2018; Neiheiser et al., 2020; Zwitter and
Hazenberg, 2020), is that the democratic processes of organizational structure are bound to
confront problems of various types that may or may not echo challenges that have existed
since time immemorial. After all, the Marxian critique of the capitalist mode of production
began with the study of the organization as fundamentally non-democratic, even as
capitalism aspired towards greater empowerment of society. The Marxian critique observed
the non-democratic nature of decision-making in capitalist organizations (the boards, the
management, the shareholder concentration, the top-down directionality) in contrast to

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democratization of the means of value creation that was purportedly democratic, and
argued that democracy was not reconcilable with such organizational structures. Such
contrasts have continued to resonate into the modern iterations of capitalism, particularly
as virtual wealth creation has grown in comparison.
As has been alluded to throughout this paper, DAOs are seen as a counterpoint to this
traditional skew in organizational ownership and participation through a decentralized basis
for the execution of protocols arrived at through consensus. For example, DAOs are
coordinated using tokens or NFTs that grant voting powers, and admission to a DAO is
limited to people who have a confirmed ownership of these tokens and membership may be
exchanged among participants. Fundamental to the participatory input of users is that DAO
management is conducted through a series of proposals on which members vote on
through the blockchain, and the possession of more governance tokens often translates to
greater voting power. One can therefore see governance merits in structuring digital
organizations in such ways, despite the hurdles that the early DAO projects (including the
original DAO) have faced. That said, governance issues in the context of DAOs still require a
systematic exploration (see also Zwitter and Hazenberg, 2020), but there are four important
problems that warrant attention: procedural tedium, legal indeterminacy, structural
rigidity, and voter manipulation. These are also listed in Figure 1.

Figure 1: DAO Governance Issues

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One problem emerges from the procedural nature of voting on DAO-related modifications.
This generates a considerable tedium which is not amenable to participatory impulses. As
an example, the BitShares exchange has been faced with a lack of voter participation, or an
absence of voter engagement, because of the labor required to consider each proposal (see
also Neiheiser, 2020) . The procedural nature of the DAO’s alterations is thus a first
governance consideration, since tedium in democratic arrangements, whether virtual or real,
dissuades participants from allocating their energies towards causes after considering the
cost-benefit calculus which bogs them with participatory rigmarole instead of streamlined
processual functionality. If virtual and technological progress really is a boon for citizens in
easing their lives, why must they get tied down in procedural problems in the digital sphere?
The second accountability problem relates to the legal indeterminacy of DAO. This
consideration is pressing because, in the past, similar organizational structures have been
regarded by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as illegal offers of unregistered
securities. This may be circumvented, but only to a slight degree, in the formation of a
general partnership structure as opposed to a corporation - but that would entail assuming
unlimited liability for participants, even if smart contract code or the DAO's promoters and
vendors state otherwise. This is a frightening legal burden that may impede the
development of DAOs, and the underlying accountability structures must be visited
carefully, so as to comply with the legal frameworks. Le cas écheant, any known participants,
or persons who are at the interface between a DAO and regulated financial systems, may be
targets for regulatory enforcement or civil actions.
A third problem is in the essential construction of the DAO. The code of a DAO will be
extremely difficult to alter once its system is in function / in operation, and there is thus a
considerable rigidity built-in to the DAO that is, in a sense, an ironic eventuality given that
digital systems are meant to be flexible and decentralized systems are intended to be
dynamic. This extends to the trivial such as bug fixes in centralized code, as well as to the
crucial issues of procedural or even structural nature. The fixing of bugs echoes the tedium
mentioned above, but it is essential to note that, bugs are not fixed, they leave the DAO
vulnerable to all sorts of attacks, and the precedent for attacks on DAOs already exists. At
the same time, initiating fixes would require (1) the writing of new code, and (2) an
agreement to migrate all the funds, which is both rigid and somewhat insecure. This creates
a dichotomy between transparency and security: although the code is visible to everyone, it
is difficult to repair.
A fourth problem emerges from the risks of voter manipulation - it is important for
safeguards to exist such that groups of voters do not scheme machinations against the DAO
machine. Given that DAOs aspire to efficient virtual democracy, the notion of manipulative
voter behavior (an ever present danger in material democracies) raises a resonant concern
with democratic structures in the wider historical sense. Indeed, the manipulative aspect
can be so severe as to sabotage the overall process of smart-contract reliant virtual
organizations. For example, DAOs can be subject to coups or hostile takeovers that disrupt
or wreak havoc upon its voting structures, especially if the voting power reflects a

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concentration of tokens as representative of the voice of voters. Democracy is premised on

one person one vote, but this is a perennial challenge in democracies and a “mantra in
search of meaning” (Levinson, 2001).
History alludes to pre-virtual contexts where such voter manipulation has weakened
democracy’s finance, as in the corporate takeover of American political life (Kapferer, 2005),
or the subversion of post-Soviet privatization into oligarchs with the mass purchase of
coupons that were given to all citizens (Burawoy, 1994). DAOs risk the same sorts of
oligarchic manifestations of political power in the concentration of voter groups or
significant voting individuals. A recent example of this was in the Build Finance DAO, which
underwent a coup after a single individual amassed sufficient token concentration to get a
vote passed, and then vote to ascribe themselves total power over the DAO, and then used
this power to siphon all of the money in the DAO. This cautionary example of Build Finance
DAO tells us that horizontal accountability will be a necessary resource in preserving the
democratic nature of the DAO’s subjacent cryptoanarchist thought.
The four foregoing problems represent challenges that are worth considering in light of
democratic decentralization efforts in a pre-digital era, with a view to asking whether digital
governance really is more robust than that of an earlier age. Procedural tedium wields a
certain irony in that “smart contracts” are posited as a digital-age efficient solution to the
execution of protocols, and yet require tedious human participation which may not offer
adequate value for their time. This is also true in the case of structural rigidity, which should
not be (but invariably is) a feature of digital architectures thus far presented in the ambit of
DAOs. Legal indeterminacy is a function of the novel and comparatively higher-risk nature of
blockchain technologies, but is in a sense a reiteration of the classic politics-administration
dichotomy (Demir and Nyhan, 2008) in that regulatory power impedes the exercise of a
(purportedly) democratic approach to digital governance, and it is justified based on the
need for the protection of citizens from dangerous behaviors of digital actors. Additionally,
the problem of voter manipulation and formations of oligarchies is, as students of history
well know, a timeless one.

Concluding Remarks
While the DAO represents a technological innovation with much promise in leveraging
blockchain to push for an autonomous, self-managing, transparent, more efficient
organization, the nature of (1) accountability, (2) security, (3) transparency, and (4) democracy
vis-a-vis the DAO have yet to be considered in significant detail. New research must build on
existing foundations to propose both theoretical and practical solutions to the functionality
of the DAO in light of the abovementioned challenges. Without this, one struggles to
envisage how the promise of a decentralized digital future can be squared with problems
that are in many ways repetitions in organizational structure across previous epochs. That
said, given the novelty of DAOs, the purpose of the foregoing discussion isn’t (and should
not be) to discourage or to foreclose the possibilities that have yet to be brought forth.
Blockchain technologies are new and have yet to find a binding limiting or constraint to their

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possibilities. That one can even conceive of new structures is a source of encouragement,
and it is worth reiterating that truly autonomous and decentralized structures, as articulated
in cryptoanarchist thought, are worthy of experimentation, effort, and imagination.

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