The Hidden Shortcomings of (D)AOs - An Empirical Study of On-Chain Governance


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Date

2024

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

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Abstract

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a recent innovation in organizational structures, which are already widely used in the blockchain ecosystem. We empirically study the on-chain governance systems of 21 DAOs and open source the live dataset. The DAOs we study are of various size and activity, and govern a wide range of protocols and services, such as decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, infrastructure projects and common goods funding. Our analysis unveils a high concentration of voting rights, a significant hidden monetary costs of on-chain governance systems, as well as a remarkably high amount of pointless governance activity.

Publication status

published

Book title

Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023 International Workshops. FC 2023

Volume

13953

Pages / Article No.

165 - 185

Publisher

Springer

Event

4th Workshop on Coordination of Decentralized Finance (CoDecFin 2023)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

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Date collected

Date created

Subject

Blockchain; Decentralized autonomous organization; On-chain governance; Liquid democracy; Measurement study

Organisational unit

03604 - Wattenhofer, Roger / Wattenhofer, Roger check_circle

Notes

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