A First Look into Blockchain DAOs

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are critical to the blockchain ecosystem as they enable decentralized decision-making and governance, and facilitate the creation of decentralized applications (DApps) and organizations. However, despite significant importance, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive overview and detailed understanding of DAOs. To address the gap, this work presents a primary investigation of DAOs (35+). We category, examine and evaluate existing DAOs regarding their operational features, (non-)functionalities and real-world performance. In addition, we provide a consolidated exploration of DAOs by conducting a literature review [1] and an empirical study on mainstream projects, particularly Snapshot [2]. Our research contributes to a better understanding of DAOs and their potential impact on the blockchain ecosystem.