Categorization of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

* Article: A. Peña-Calvin, J. Saldivar, J. Arroyo and S. Hassan, "A Categorization of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: The Case of the Aragon Platform," in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2023 doi: 10.1109/TCSS.2023.3299254.

URL = https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10217072

Abstract

"Despite experiencing remarkable growth, currently boasting nearly 7M users and 18 billion in assets,DAOs remain relatively underexplored in the existing literature, particularly from an empirical perspective. This study presents a comprehensive framework comprising 15 dimensions to categorize DAOs based on their operational domain, purpose, scope, voting process, and utilization of crypto−tokens. By applying this categorization schema to 40 DAO communities hosted on the Aragon platform, encompassing over 423000 participants and managing treasuries worth 960M, we shed light on the prevailing characteristics of these DAOs. Contrary to assertions made by blockchain enthusiasts, our analysis reveals that DAOs predominantly operate in financial and technological domains, primarily offering blockchain-based services. Additionally, our investigation into their governance structure exposes limitations in terms of democratic participation, as decision-making power typically correlates with the number of tokens owned by the voter, resembling plutocracies rather than true democracies."