An Empirical Assessment of Investments in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

## Background

DAOs – the end of management structures as we know them? DAOs are very new: Launched in 2016, “The DAO” was the first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) intended to act as an investor-directed venture capital firm. Lauded as a revolutionary project, The DAO raised $150 million USD worth of ether (ETH) and was one of the earliest crowdfunding efforts and high-profile projects built on the Ethereum blockchain – which at the time was only one year old (find more information [here](https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#section-what-is-a-dao)).

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) which include decentralize autonomous corporations (DACs) are the first step towards truly democratized decentralized networks of companies without a sole beneficiary that provides the network.

The core concept of DAOs is that a virtual entity that has a certain set of members or shareholders that have the right to spend the entities funds and modify its code. This allows members to collectively decide the future of the organization and its assets using smart contracts.

DAOs are defined as non-hierarchical organizations that perform and record routine tasks on a peer-to-peer, cryptographically secure, public network, and rely on the voluntary contributions of their internal stakeholders to operate, manage, and evolve the organization through a democratic consultation process.

– A DAO is a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern
themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public
blockchain, and whose governance is decentralised (i.e., independent from central
control).
– DAOs enable people to coordinate and self-govern themselves online. Although no mention is made as to the minimum size of the group, the term “organization” is generally understood to refer to an entity comprising multiple people acting towards a common goal, rather than a legally registered organization.
– A DAO source code is deployed in a blockchain with smart contract capabilities like Ethereum—arguably always a public blockchain.
– A DAO’s smart contract code specifies the rules for interaction among people -although it is unclear to which extent there may be other governance mechanisms that can affect or overrule such code.
– Since these rules are defined using smart contracts, they are self-executed independently of the will of the parties.
– The DAO governance should remain independent from central control: e.g. some definitions specifically refer to self-governed, self-organizing, peer-to-peer and democratic control.
– Since they rely on a blockchain, DAOs inherit some of its properties, such as transparency, cryptographic security, and decentralization

## Goals

– RQ1: Are VC DAOs (BitDAO, a16z..) performing better than traditional VCs?
– RQ2: What makes investments in crowdfunding DAOs attractive compared to traditional crowdfunding? What is in for the investor? // check for example freerossDAO, AssangeDAO, UkraineDAO
– RQ3: What are the risks of investing **in** DAOs? How can the risks be assessed? // RISK ASSESSMENT
– RQ4: How to assess investments **of** DAOs // PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF **THE DAO**
– RQ5: How to assess investments **in** DAOs // PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF **THE USER**

Structure of the Research Proposal
1. Working title
o the title should make very clear what the research is about

2. Context of the research project
o What is the state-of-the-art in the field?
o Why is your project relevant?
o How does your project relate to work of other scientists in the field?
o What is the research question that you would like to answer?

3. Research question (in detail) and working hypotheses
o What do you want to find out?
o What could the results of your research look like?

4. Research approach and methods
o How do you intend to answer your research question?
o Which theoretical framework are you going to apply?
o How do you want to gather data (experiments, randomized controlled trials, surveys, etc.)?
o How do you want to analyse the data?

5. Preliminary schedule
o How much time will you need for the individual steps of the project? (Timeline is 6 months)

6. Bibliography
o A list of the most the important literature your research will be based on