I don’t know who needs to hear this, but anyone who wants to broadcast the concept of DAOs beyond the circles where they already exist, it’s time to ditch the terminology that makes outsiders cringe.

There are plenty of examples of why language in crypto has to shift from technocratic dev terms to less technical or lore-based terms. It’s unapproachable and ultimately a obfuscated string of letters and to the layperson. One of my favourite examples is Reddit with their wallets turning into vaults, and NFTs suddenly transformed into digital collectibles. NBA Top Shot, Polymarket, Brave - these are examples of real consumer adoption & digestion with everyday language. Why would “DAOs” be any different?

I have to do the thing every DAO person has done a million times before me: define a DAO. The literal acronym stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. These letters, these words - wtf does this all mean?

Firstly, these entities are primarily meant to be non-profits. If your DAO is for-profit, typically it is actually categorized as a DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Company), or one of the many other sub-structures of onchain organizations. Suffice it to say, it’s a community-operated org structure aiming to keep their censorship-resistant rules agreed-upon by the people who operate it (decentralized governance). In an ideal world, voting power is distributed by level of participation in the org, with members transparently voting on proposals written & voted for onchain.

The amazing thing about these orgs being onchain is that the voting can auto-trigger an action if it were written into the protocol; an easy example of this is a treasury allocation. The programmable tools DAOs create open up a new world of human coordination. The very thought of this future was so compelling that I had to dive into this world head as a student, member, and contributor. I wanted to be a part of creating the future of what work can look like.

Why a DAO?

Community Owned, Community Governed

I have had the distinct honor to learn & converse with many great founders, thinkers, and contributors, and one thing I have always loved about the DAO contributor mindset is the flat org concept, which lacks any hierarchy. This supports a healthy community-owned-and-governed model, a key component to a (hopefully) egalitarian org structure. It supports a collective rapport building, trust among members, and its transparency allows for accountability. Paired with community voting, and there you may find your aligned group incentives.

Spin up a DAO as fast as lightning

The 0 to 1 time in a DAO vs traditional business makes this an attractive model.

A considerable factor for founders is capital, and with DAOs, this opens up the liquidity pool to the aforementioned governing members. Token sales are often used as a way for early believers to receive a governing token allocation, and other mechanisms like staking, mining, or even NFT sales which can boost the treasury of the DAO for the collective vision. Businesses or founding groups may find it easier to crowdfund with these supporters and angels rather than raise from traditional VCs out of the bat, and might even be better off as they continue to refine their broader product-market-fit.(Not to mention that what is good for a VC ROI is not always good for an end user or dApp, so tap into VC funds mindfully.)

Trust No Corporation

…or any huge entity for that matter. Consumer faith in massive entities continues to dramatically wane with hair-raising corruption and unprecedented displays of profits over people. DAOs use tools like cryptography and smart contracts to reduce friction and interjection from intermediaries. Actions are written openly on the blockchain, so there will always be a way to trace where money is moving. Not to mention the fact the community token can also be used to better control the value created instead of being beholden to the macro economies that hyperinflate their own currency.

Possibility’s Future

One of the main reasons this is an exciting new time is the possibility of a more streamlined operation to help other work like running the business or planning an event. My friend Justice, who is a brilliant DAO thinker, points out that businesses are always looking for more automation to save on labor and time.

When orgs have programmable components, brand new possibilities in automation will start to emerge. Paired with AI as it advances, and it becomes exciting to carve out custom solutions for specific needs.

A Contributor’s Work

When I was at my peak DAO contributor mode, I was working with a few different projects that had similar tasks with different contexts: community discovery/mapping/maintenance/surveying, and talking to users like myself across tech, business, and art. Keeping vibes impeccable (duh).It felt like I had some of the world’s smartest people from all their respective corners available to me as an effect of the last bull run, and I did not squander the wisdom gained in this time.

I built my foundation as a strategic thinker through talking to everyone I could in those days: devs, researchers, investors, builders/founders, newbie devs, degens, artists, community builders, writers, thinkers, analysts, scammers. Being on the ground floor will always be important to me to understand sentiment & problems at their root.

We used to joke that we were “so early” (we still are), but we were embryonic in those days. Painfully, we still don’t know how to properly resolve conflicts, voting participation is scarce, not to mention the issue with voting distribution, and in general, DAOs were soooo right of the curve that many often tried to reinvent community when we’ve known how to run communities before the internet was a thing.

We were high on our own vibe supply, with WAGMI as a warcry. Be that as it may, DAOs offered something that traditional companies could never: a sense of hope.

But, Please Don’t Call It A DAO

I’ve always had an issue with the term, “DAO” because of its misuse & oversaturation. In the (sometimes pedantic) arguments I’ve witnessed over DAOs, I often see the points ignore a very crucial component to make it all work: people.

When this piece gets ignored, the whole thing just starts to fall apart. Whether it’s to automate your business ops, pool funds together, or vote, DAOs are tools in service to people. And the trustless component is the part where machines mitigate our own human urges and downfalls with cold-coded rules. I think this piece can help us battle corruption, waste, & greed somehow in the future.

I won’t write a paper about what qualifies a DAO vs what doesn’t. That’s not the point I’m here to make. Rather, I would like to point out there are ways to restructure and reorganize businesses/orgs that help them spin up faster, with shared community ownership, that can help automate in new ways. I encourage founders to explore the mechanisms that will help their business strengthen their communities, products, and organizations with tools from DAOs. But please don’t call it that.

When talking to my non-crypto friends, I explain the DAO concept as a digital co-op where money is pooled, everyone votes on what to do with it, & those outcomes or new rules get programmed in. Oversimplified, but that’s how you talk to regular people who aren’t going to spend 100 hours reading up on the fringes of human coordination technology. Other names I have heard for a DAO-like structures include:

• Onchain Organizations

• Tokenized Communities

• Crypto/Blockchain/E- Co-Op

• Financial Flashmobs (cringe)

I have varying levels of preferences for these. Use them with discretion as you need to describe it to curious normies.

Ok, what *do* I call it?

𝚝𝚕;𝚍𝚛
𝚠/𝚎 𝚞 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚋𝚋

Going back to the examples above, mainstream adopted brands used their own strong branding, community goodwill, and product design/language to expand & compliment their efforts. Your community or the mainstream or whoever you're targeting should be spoken to in their language.In order to onboard the masses, don’t make it harder for yourself. You can simplify the rules or adjust the structures, mechanisms, & operations as you need to support your community, but the name should be thought of as a brand.

Friends with Benefits (FWB) has done a great job of eliminating the DAO part of the name in favor of keeping it simple. To me, this took the cringe factor that some of the DAO conversations I saw earlier out of the question, which is probably how they were able to bring in tons of creatives and visionaries to the space. I am an active member, & I know that internally we do know it’s a DAO and try to run it like one, but that’s the unspoken beauty of being on a long journey of learning together.

Some other DAOs that operate without the name are on the protocol level, like Uniswap or Aave. While these are hella crypto-native, they do omit the DAO in the title, though it’s certainly implied. This might be a trend we see as these tools & orgs become more established & standardized, and thus require a need to adapt their language & approachability.

I cofounded GENRE, but initially, we called ourselves GENREDAO, which already gave us glazed eyes from our  audience of music fans. This project started as an experiment to enhance LEAVING RECORDS, the experimental all-genre label, with blockchain elements and shared community ownership. Our people are traditional label and music fans, not necessarily technologists; they may not know what a protocol is & may never want to know. And yet, we proceeded.

Our first steps into the space as a collective caused some initial polarization from our foray into NFT experiments, especially around the environment (pre-merge) and the obviously-bad optics in mainstream media regarding he who shall not be mentioned from the three-lettered exchange. But the pushback allowed us to take the time to rethink our approach to our already-formed community in order to gently nudge them to greener grass. Our solution was to obscure the terms, take the time to educate, and ease slowly into the progressive decentralization we dream of. But we argue because we had to slow down in order to meet our fans where they are today, there are clearer pathways to make our own community-owned dreams come true.

My Personal Affinity for Onchain Orgs

In 2020 when my awareness shifted to Ethereum, DAOs were my way into the eth ecosystem which was prohibitively priced at that time. I learned quickly on the ground floor of a bustling Discord, ingesting substack articles & whitepapers, & in twitter threads/discussions/spaces. It was overwhelming but exciting. That time was truly like a self-induced intense internship.

I write all this to say that I believe in decentralized onchain orgs as a viable future for more folks to start pooling and funding what they believe in. For businesses to adopt the idea of profit sharing as a sustainable incentive, and menial work to be programmed and automated. Where communities relish in collective ownership, and control can be taken on how and what they value.

***And I know I said a lot about not calling things DAOs, but if you are a native DAO in the space and love the name or it's become part of your brand, you can think of this as a mark of an OG, like MakerDAO.

Special thanks to Lani Trock, 0xJustice & Marco Grendel and everyone sharing knowledge about human coordination & DAOS for being my north stars & co-conspirators *