You may have seen the term used casually in a Tweet.

Or, maybe you heard your weird friend who does nothing but talk about pixelated JPEGS utter the phrase at that party a week ago.

You may have come across the acronym in a Discord server while you were right-click saving millions worth of art right into that “portfolio” folder on your desktop.

But, what the hell is a DAO? Why does it matter? And, most importantly, why should you care?

I have provided several resources for you below so you can explore the wonderful world of DAOs. These resources are organized in order of depth on the topic. Several examples of DAOs are included at the bottom of the list. I will leave much of the explanation to those who are more sophisticated and eloquent than I, but here’s a brief appetizer to put you in the proper emotional and digestive state so you can dive in.

DAOs Will Change the World

A Distributed Autonomous Organization, or DAO, is a paradigm shift in how we define ownership, organizational design, and community governance. There are a number of applications already in the market today and many more are waiting to be dreamt of and implemented in the future.

From art, to business, to social capital, DAOs have cemented themselves as a cornerstone of the emerging ownership economy that favors partnership and cooperation rather than transactional relationships and value extraction.

Very simply put, DAOs enable ownership. Think about owning a share of Apple stock. As the holder of that digital stock certificate, you own a piece of Apple. You have the right to vote on company initiatives, and you may benefit from increases in the company’s value or dividends that may be issued.

A DAO creates tokens that are analogous to those Apple stock certificates. Those tokens can be either fungible tokens (interchangeable assets that may be used to transact like paper currency or Bitcoin) or non-fungible tokens (one-of-a-kind artworks or assets).

Alright, so now your primed and ready to go. The bread and butter is nothing but crumbs. Time for the main course.

Resources - Read, Learn, Think

DAO Basics

A beginner’s guide to DAOs - Linda Xie

The industry standard for learning the basics.

A DAO Defined: The Big Picture

An important philosophical step on your DAO journey, provided by the team at Aragon.

How to DAO: Answers for Beginners

A simple FAQ from the team at Aragon. Consider this your quick reference guide.

DAO Deeper

The Defiant

A comprehensive article from The Defiant’s Kevin Nielsen on the current DAO landscape.

The Dao of DAOs - Packy McCormick

Packy, a legend in the NFT space, discusses technology, decentralization, and evaluates the competitive advantages of DAOs.

DAO Deeper Still

A Taxonomy of Voting Methods - Aragon

Aragon presents this is a primer on several methods of voting that may exist within a DAO. This is not an exhaustive list, but is a good start.

Maker DAO Whitepaper

A detailed manifesto from Maker DAO, the ambitious project founded in 2014 creating digital-native currency.

DAO Examples

Olympus DAO

Fingerprints DAO

Bankless DAO

Planetary DAO

Friends with Benefits

Surf Finance

How to NFT 1.0 - Epilogue

Thanks for reading, I hope you have a better understanding of how powerful DAOs can be and the ways in which they will change our economy, culture, and governance.

Please reach out to me @thepeffrey, I’d love to hear from you and start a conversation.

This is the first edition of How to NFT, a series in which we’ll explore various topics that will help you become a more educated member of the NFT community. I don’t have all (or most) of the answers and I am nowhere close to an expert. I’m just curious and passionate about the space and want to share what I’ve learned. Let’s change the world, together. WGMI.