Constellation ShortList™ Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) Platforms

Distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs) are member-owned communities without centralized leadership. A DAO’s financial records and rules of operation are usually maintained on a blockchain with many of their rules embodied in code, typically smart contracts. DAOs have grown in popularity recently as a way of creating transparent and decentralized organizations similar to corporations as part of the overall crypto and Web3 movement.

Software platforms have arisen to make creating and operating DAOs more straightforward, accessible, and easier to work with. While the DAO platform landscape is changing very rapidly, most have a general scheme that involves a central platform with several supporting apps or modules that enable popular types of activities and use cases, such as venture investing, fundraising, or launching a cryptocurrency.

DAOs take online community activity to the next level by creating more involvement and commitment through the accumulation and use of dedicated resources, as well as a stake for anyone that is allowed membership in the DAO. DAOs post their rules openly and make it easy for stakeholders to contribute, especially to submit proposals and vote on community action. DAOs have the aspiration to be a more open, fair, and equitable way to create a modern digital enterprise.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Administrative controls and configuration/cus- tomization features
• Analytics/metrics/dashboards/visualizations of OKR progress
• Support for a treasury built on a cryptocurrency or other digital resources
• Client options: desktop, mobile, tablet, large screen, wearables, embedded in other applications
• Collaboration features such as chat or online community
• Dashboards to monitor KPIs for the DAO including requests, transactions, treasury status, votes, payments, and so on
• Governance protocols stored in a blockchain, with automatic run-time enforcement
• Extensibility (APIs/SDKs, documentation, samples, training)
• Licensing options (open source, freemium, premium, enterprise, external access)
• A low-code/no-code way to author smart contracts that define the DAO’s rules
• A proposal and voting system for managing existing shared assets
• Tracking approved work toward a common goal
• A system for adding and removing members
• Integration with other needed business tools/platforms
• Search and discovery capabilities
• Features to prevent co-opting, fraud, and theft of DAO resources
• Security (access roles, administration roles, transport and storage, encryption key ownership)

 

The Constellation ShortList™