DAO: MOLTI CITTADINI INVESTONO NELLA IMPRESA VIRTUALE DEL FUTURO .

Built on the Ethereum network, a DAO (or online co-operative) is a decentralised group of participants who each receive voting rights on how it should operate. Each participant buys tokens representing their say.

A group can program what the entity should do at what time and is designed to be a democratically driven vehicle.

The organisation now in control of $US150 million worth of ether hopes to deploy its capital to Ethereum-based projects and in turn generate income. However, like many technology start-ups, generating revenue seems less front of mind than creating or funding projects with a compelling theorum.

“The notion of a self-executing contract is very interesting,” says Mr Abrahams, who advises clients on how to deploy blockchain technology within their organisations.

“But people are getting carried away that it’s a replacement for a company, when it can’t form a contractual relationship. A company is not a human but has human-like capabilities under the law, that protects people involved. A DAO has no rights and that leaves members without protection.”

A range of new organisations

While the DAO is just one project, built by the developers of Ethereum, many more DAOs have been theorised using the decentralised notion of consensus, meaning participants all have voting rights and the power to move the company in one direction or another.

Whereas Bitcoin spawned new ways of rethinking the monetary system, DAO has developers rethinking the traditional organisation structure.

Hugo O’Connor, head of innovation at Bit Trade Australia, has developed a decentralised organisation called UnionD, using software that aims to efficiently distribute the skills of a particular sector of a workforce.

“We are trying to systematise the organising of groups of people sharing common skills or interests,” says Mr O’Connor. “Guilds, co-operatives and friendly societies share many of these ideas which until now have not been formalised in software.”

At the recent Consensus cryptocurrency conference in New York, Mr O’Connor and his team received an honourable mention for UnionD.

“A decentralised autonomous organisation is about redistributing power to the collective pool of people, rather than a central point,” says Mr O’Connor.

​Mr O’Connor said he has personally participated in the DAO’s recent blockbuster fund-raising, along with several of his colleagues.

While the DAO has finished its first round of funding, breaking all previous crowdfunding records, Duncan Campbell doesn’t expect to see a return on his investment for at least another 12 months.

“This is about funding projects that other scientists, mathematicians and cryptographers are working on,” he says.

“I’ve got in early because in the world of cryptocurrency, early adopters tend to be rewarded the most. People who were mining Bitcoin on their laptops at the beginning have such an advantage over people wanting to buy in later.”

While there’s still a lot unclear about the DAO or how DAOs in general will operate, the idea itself has captured much attention.

Questions still to be answered include what happens if DAO tokens are slowly accumulated to one source, rather than remaining decentralised nature, and whether we could we see an ASX-listed DAO in the future.