In the early days of the cryptocurrency space, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and smart contracts were discussed in theory. Many now consider The DAO, launched in 2016 by members of the Slock.it development team, to be the first smart contract-based DAO, as statistics show that by 2022, $10 billion will be held in DAO treasury, and more There are many.
Thousands of DAOs, $10 billion held in treasury, 1.7 million governors token holders
Smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) were in the imagination of several legendary cryptographers long before the concept was introduced. Following Satoshi Nakamoto’s great inventionblockchain technology combined with smart contracts opened the door to decentralized organizations.
In 2016, Ethereum developers and members of the Slock.it team created what manyrefer to and cite as the first decentralized autonomous organizationStephan Tual, Simon Jentzsch, and Christoph After Jentzsch announcedthe DAO. the project successfully raised $150 million from tokens sold.
However, due to a vulnerability in its codebase, The DAO was hacked and attackers managed to siphon off millions of dollars in Ethereum (ETH).” This is an issue that affects The DAO specifically; Ethereum itself is perfectly safe.” Vitalik Buterin stated in June 2016; areportpublished by Consensys in September 2021recorded “978,000 DAO members” and the DAO attack did not stop DAO creation.
“Current projects include token services for DAOs, governance, financial management, risk management, growth, community, operations, and much more focused solely on development.” Read the full Consensys report here.
According to an academic paper on DAOs, the concept “may usher in a new era in organizational economics”
According to statistics from the analysis web portaldeepdao.iothe value held by the heads of decentralized autonomous organizations is currently $10 billion in treasury holdings. According to the index at the time of writing, $7.1 billion is in flux and $2.9 billion is currently fixed.
Among the top DAOs, there are 1.7 million governance token holders and 669,000 active voters and proposers; Uniswap’s DAO has the largest treasury at $2.2 billion as of this writing, and Gnosis is the second largest at $1.5 billion.
Uniswap also has the largest number of Governance Token Holders, with 332,900 recorded today. In terms of governor token holders, Uniswap is followed by Decentland, Compound, ENS, Urb, and Synthetics; below Uniswap and Gnosis in treasury holdings are Bitdao ($1.3B), Polkadot ($441.9M), and UXD Protocol ($ 406.9M).
In terms of treasury size, today’s top 3 DAOs hold multiple tokens, while Polkadot’s DAO holds only DOT.UXD protocol leverages five different cryptos in Treasury, including the project’s algorithmic stablecoin based on the Solana blockchain. out of Uniswap’s 332,900 governance token holders, deepdao.io statistics show that there are 8.5 million active members, indicating that there are only 8, 400 active members.
Gnosis has 17,700 governance token holders, but metrics show only 1,500 active members. uniswap has 83 governance proposals, Gnosis has 43 proposals, and Bitdao currently has 10 proposals that users can vote on. has 10 proposals that can be voted on; Pancake Swap has 3,300 and the metaverse project Decentraland has 1,200 governance proposals on the table, with Pancake Swap and Decentraland having the most.
DAOs are now definitely a reality, but there is much debateabout how decentralized and autonomous they actually are. Despite some setbacks, an academic paper on DAOsstates that, overall, “DAOs may introduce a new era in organizational economics and change the landscape of global corporations from hierarchical organizations to democratic, decentralized organizations driven by organizational entrepreneurship and innovation.” He stated.
Image credit: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons