DAO

A decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), sometimes also called a decentralised autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organisation that is coded by a transparent computer programme. The programme is neither controlled by shareholders nor influenced by a central government.The financial transaction record and programme rules of a DAO are maintained on distributed ledger technology (DLT). The exact legal status of this type of business organisation is unclear.

Decentralised autonomous organisations[7] are characterised by the use of DLT (such as Blockchain or a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)). They provide a secure digital ledger to track financial interactions over the internet. This is protected against forgery through trusted timestamps and the dissemination of a distributed database. This approach removes the need to involve a mutually acceptable trusted third party in a financial transaction, simplifying the transaction.

The cost of a DLT-enabled transaction and associated data reporting can be essentially offset by eliminating both the trusted third party and the need for repeated record-keeping from exchanging contracts in different data sets. For example, DLT data could, in principle and if regulatory structures allow, replace public documents such as deeds and titles. In theory, a DLT approach allows multiple users of cloud computing (data clouds) to engage in loosely coupled collaboration via smart contract.

Daniel Larimer proposed the concept of a „decentralised organised firm“ in a published article on 7 September 2013.

Vitalik Buterin suggested that once a DAO is launched, it could be organised to function without human interactivity from a manager, provided the smart contracts are supported by a Turing completeness. Ethereum, which is built on a blockchain and was launched in 2015, meets this standard and thus enables DAOs. Decentralised autonomous organisations aim to be open platforms where individuals control their identity and personal data.