Daoism - Is it really decentralized or a mere illusion?
As per definition, DAO stands for decetralized autonomous organization which is transparent and is not influenced by any central authority and is rather owned by members.
Usually, smart contracts are backbones of DAOs. Also, there is no doubt that decentralization feature is the one which attracts majority of tech enthusiasts towards crypto, NFTs and blockchain networks. Ideally, DAOs should have a completely flat hierarchy where each and every member should have a equal say. In a nutshell, DAOs represent a powerful alignment engine to collapse the categories of user or buyer, company or team, and investor into a single group that’s aligned and part of a community that cares about a certain artifact or a certain experience.
But the question that arises is that whether really the DAOs works the way that they should be or it is just the distinctive marketing agenda to expand the community and collect funding from bigger institutions. Well, there is a lot of grey area there. Let’s talk about a small process of approving grants. So DAO grants are funded by investors and and the idea is to collectively grow however in some DAOs the decision of whether the grant will be approved or not lies with council members and not with the members of the DAO or through all members’ voting which should be the ideal case in DAOs’ grant approval system. In a true sense, this should be the ideal scenario of process regu;larisation of grant approvals and only by following this process DAOs should claim themselves to be “decentralized”. In absence of this nature of grant approvals, I believe DAOs are merely sugar coated or marketed version of traditional communities where power still lies with bunch of people with the illusion of power distribution where communities are built through perceptional democratic images of these DAOs where most of the new joinees like me think that it would be a safe ground without dictators ruling in these spaces but unfortunately the truth is not so sweet.
Going forward there are two ways out there- either creators need to realise there is a challenge to redefine the rules for existing DAOs as at some point the perception of decentralization propoganda will be clear to majority of stakeholders. Another way could be that members need to know that decentralization is still far ahead and as per now it is just another marketing gimic to lure more members in to expand communities where money will go to only handful of people.
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