(2021-09-26) DAOs May Be The Future Of Work, But Don't Bet On Them Being The Next Big Asset Class

DAOs May Be the Future of Work, but Don’t Bet on Them Being the Next Big Asset Class. A growing number of Ethereum enthusiasts believe that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) could be the future of work, cultural communities and human organization

DAOs are a bet on the future of human organization itself

Ameen Soleimani, an early DAO pioneer and the founder of SpankChain, jokingly refers to them as “glorified budget committees” or “group chats with a joint bank account.”

Tooling and functionality have seen significant upgrades with work from organizations like Colony, Aragon and Coordinape. Opolis, a benefits and payroll cooperative, can even help full-time DAO workers get health care.

As a number of experts told CoinDesk, however, betting on the future of DAOs is a surprisingly tricky proposition.

Kevin Owocki, CEO at DAO-run grants organization Gitcoin....went on: “If we’re successful, MetaFactory will disrupt Shopify, if we’re successful Friends With Benefits will disrupt Y Combinator, if we’re successful then Gitcoin will disrupt LinkedIn. It’s the churning of culture where thousands of experiments are flourishing, and only 10 will be successful, but the successful ones will be big.”

Picking those winners is dicey work, however, and aiming for the entities that provide the infrastructure for DAOs might be a higher-percentage play.

“There’s a group of Gen Z people who feel screwed over by late-stage capitalism,” said Owocki. “We inherited this economy where climate change is a big problem, misinformation is a big problem, where we don’t trust our institutions and we have our new culture that we’re inventing that is built around our generation’s needs and values and thoughts.”

Plenty of early DAO participants – Moloch DAO “summoners” and MetaCartel donors who went through the early experiments – are currently flourishing, and likewise have spawned a whole family tree of projects.

“In the case of, for example, Joseph Delong, who was an Eth 2.0 developer at ConsenSys, he decided of his own volition to join Moloch DAO, put up 100 ETH of his own money to fund Eth 2.0 development – that was his own stuff. And now he’s in the leadership.” Delong is currently the CTO of decentralized finance platform Sushi, a position that affords him significant community sway.

Likewise, Soleimani spoke with pride about Cooper Turley (“Cooopahtroopa”), who Moloch DAO once paid to write an end-of-year blog post. Turley has gone on to become a full-time “DAO-lord,” as Soleimani puts it – a key figure in groups such as FireEyes and Friends With Benefits.

Those opportunities, in turn, also expand the DAO ecosystem. Warren and Soleimani both noted that DAO members often go on to form new organizations, one which may have a different mission, purpose and needs – needs that prompt new investment in DAO infrastructure.