The concept of smart contracts was discussed and debated in the beginning years of the cryptocurrency industry. Today, many consider that The DAO was the first smart-contract-based DAO. It was launched in 2016 and created by Slock.it’s development team. In 2022, there’s a lot more DAOs, as statistics show that $10 billion is held by DAO treasuries.
Tens of thousands of DAOs and $10 Billillion in Treasuries. 1.7 Million Governance Token holders
Before the concept was even invented, smart contracts were created and decentralized autonomous groups (DAOs), first imagined by a handful of legendary cryptographers. Following Satoshi Nakamoto’s great invention, blockchain technology coupled with smart contracts opened the doors for decentralized organizations.
Slock.it staff members, Ethereum developers, and others created The DAO in 2016. Many refer to it as the “first decentralized autonomous organisation”. With the help of the tokens that were sold, Stephan Tual, Simon Jentzsch and Christoph Jentzsch launched The DAO. This project raised $150 million.
Due to flaws in the codebase, however, the DAO was compromised and an attacker gained access to millions in Ethereum (ETH) “This is an issue that affects the DAO specifically; Ethereum itself is perfectly safe,” Vitalik Buterin said in June 2016. The DAO attack did not stop the creation of DAOs, as a report published in September 2021 by Consensys recorded “978,000 DAO members.”
“Current projects include many that focus solely on token services, governance, treasury management, risk management, growth, community, operations, and development for DAOs,” the Consensys report details.
Academic Paper on DAOs Says Concept ‘May Introduce a New Era in Organizational Economics’
Statistics from the analytical web portal deepdao.io shows there’s $10 billion in value held by the top decentralized autonomous organizations today in terms of treasury holdings. According to current metrics, $7.1 billion of assets are liquid. $2.9 billion has been vested as of the writing.
There are approximately 1.7 million tokenholders of governance tokens and 6699,000 proposal-makers and active voters among the top DAOs. Uniswap’s DAO has the largest treasury at the time of writing, with $2.2 billion, and Gnosis is the second largest with $1.5 billion.
Uniswap is also home to the highest number of governance token holders (332,900) today. Decentraland and Compound are the next most prominent governance token holders, followed by Synthetix, ENS (Ensemble), ENS (Ensemble), Aave and Synthetix. Below Uniswap’s and Gnosis’s treasury holdings are Bitdao ($1.3B), Polkadot ($441.9M), and UXD protocol ($406.9M).
The top three DAOs today, in terms of treasury size, hold multiple tokens while Polkadot’s DAO only holds DOT. UXD protocol leverages five different cryptos in the treasury, including the project’s algorithmic stablecoin based on the Solana blockchain. Out of Uniswap’s 332,900 governance token holders, deepdao.io statistics indicate there are only 8,400 active members.
Gnosis is home to 17,700 token-holders of governance, yet only 1,500 people are active. Uniswap is home to 83 governance proposal, Gnosis boasts 43 and Bitdao has 10 that users can vote. Pancake Swap is the largest provider of proposals, with 3,300 Pancake Swap proposals. Decentraland’s metaverse project Decentraland currently offers 1,200 governance suggestions.
DAOs are most definitely a reality now, but there’s a whole lot of debate on how decentralized and autonomous they really are. Despite some setbacks, an academic paper on DAOs says that overall, “DAOs may introduce a new era in organizational economics, transforming the global corporate landscape from hierarchical organizations to democratic and distributed organizations powered by organizational entrepreneurship and innovations.”
Do you have any thoughts about the $10 billion in DAO treasuries and the thousands of DAOs that exist today? Please comment below to let us know your thoughts on this topic.
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