daos

ARK Invest Research Director Lorenzo Valente commented on the OpenUSD stablecoin project launched by several institutions. He stated that, despite the strong capabilities of the participants (including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, etc.), OpenUSD faces multiple significant obstacles:First, there are liquidity and cold start issues; USDC and USDT have already formed strong network effects, dominating exchanges, payment processors, and brokers, making it difficult for the new stablecoin to gain trading pairs and large-scale holding willingness;Second, the decision-making speed of the alliance composed of 500 competitors will be extremely slow, lacking successful precedents, and conflicts of interest will be hard to coordinate;Third, the regulatory and antitrust risks are extremely high; the joint issuance of currency by large banks and card networks is likely to become a regulatory focus;Fourth, the revenue-sharing model results in issuers retaining too little capital, making it difficult to cover high operational and promotional expenses;Fifth, the actual commitments from partners are limited, mostly consisting of letters of intent (LOI), and parties are still supporting competitors, preferring multiple hedges rather than exclusive binding.Valente concluded that OpenUSD is essentially similar to "a DAO of multiple competitors," making it difficult to execute and make decisions quickly, and it may ultimately repeat the governance failures of early DAO projects, which could not be effectively implemented.Affected by the OpenUSD plan, Circle's stock fell over 17% in a single day, and ARK Invest took the opportunity to buy in.

a16z Crypto General Partner Ali Yahya stated that in the previous crypto era, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) were undoubtedly a failed experiment, but this may simply be due to "being born at the wrong time."Ali Yahya admitted that over the past 10 years, the industry has painfully rediscovered that "direct democracy is a bad idea," as no ordinary users are willing to wake up in the morning to adjudicate risk parameters or protocol upgrades. He emphasized that with changes in the compliance landscape, the industry will regain legitimate space for experimentation, allowing exploration of representative democracy, bicameral systems, or hybrid architectures of licensed and unlicensed systems; at the same time, AI agents can fill many management responsibilities that humans are unwilling to undertake, thus allowing DAOs to truly move towards "autonomy," with the design space for the new generation of DAOs as software being limitless.

The Governor of Alabama has signed Bill SB 277, creating a legal framework for nonprofit entities similar to DAOs. Alabama becomes the second state in the United States to establish a legal framework for entities similar to DAOs. The bill stipulates that members of a DAO are generally not personally liable for its collective activities.

According to Cointelegraph, the governor of Alabama has signed the "Decentralized Non-Registered Non-Profit Association Act," becoming the second state to grant legal status to DAOs after Wyoming.The act provides legal status and limited liability protection for DAOs, allowing them to have full corporate entity qualifications, own property, sue and be sued, and enter into contracts, while individual members and managers are exempt from personal liability. The eligibility requirements state that a DAO must have at least 100 members and be formed for a common non-profit purpose (such as governing a blockchain network or smart contract system). The policy director of a16z Crypto stated that decentralized governance is at the core of the future of crypto, and this act provides certainty for decentralized communities to build, govern, and scale in the real world. A similar bill in West Virginia has passed the House and is awaiting the governor's signature.

On March 26, the European Central Bank published a working paper studying the governance concentration of four major DeFi protocols: Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap.The paper, based on holding snapshot data from November 2022 and May 2023, found that although governance tokens are distributed across tens of thousands of addresses, the top 100 holders in each protocol control over 80% of the supply, and a large number of governance tokens can be linked to the protocols themselves or centralized and decentralized exchanges, with Binance being the largest identified centralized exchange holder among the four protocols.In terms of voting participation, the paper noted that actual voters are mainly representatives who obtain proxy voting rights from small holders. The top 20 voters in Ampleforth control 96% of the proxy voting rights, the top 10 voters in MakerDAO hold 66%, and the top 18 voters in Uniswap hold 52%. About one-third of the main voters cannot be publicly identified.The paper argues that these findings challenge the assumption of inherent decentralization in DAOs, making it more difficult to determine regulatory anchors under the EU MiCA framework. MiCA currently excludes "fully decentralized" services from its scope. The paper also points out that it is impossible to determine from public data whether the holdings associated with the protocols belong to founders, developers, or treasuries, nor can it be determined whether exchange wallets are voting on behalf of themselves or their clients. The paper represents the authors' views and does not represent the official position of the European Central Bank.

Regarding Ethereum co-founder Vitalik's call for more and better DAOs, DeFi researcher Ignas published a rebuttal on the X platform, stating that DAOs are typically operated by three groups: core teams or foundations, professional delegated representatives, and whales. The existence of professional delegated representatives is due to the fact that most token holders neglect governance, with 95% of votes being related to technical upgrades, and someone needs to be compensated to pay attention to these matters.This tripartite alliance has flaws and systemic risks, such as the incident where COMP tokens worth $24 million were "legally" voted by the community to be transferred from the Compound treasury to a strange and unmonitorable multi-signature address in 2024, triggering a DAO governance attack. In theory, as long as the project founders decide to care about the DAO, everything is feasible, but many people simply do not care.

Vitalik Buterin stated that the current practices of DAOs in the crypto industry have deviated from the original vision, and it is necessary to rethink and construct "different and better DAO designs." Vitalik pointed out that Ethereum's initial concept was heavily inspired by decentralized autonomous organizations, but today DAOs are often simplified to "treasuries controlled by token voting." While they may function in form, they are inefficient, easily manipulated, and fail to truly alleviate the issues arising from human political games.Vitalik emphasized that DAOs remain an indispensable infrastructure, with application scenarios including: improving oracle designs, implementing on-chain dispute arbitration, maintaining various critical lists, quickly launching short-term collaborative projects, and supporting long-term project maintenance after the original team exits. He believes that the current problem lies not in the motivations of participants, but in the governance and system designs, such as oracles, which are still inadequate.In terms of governance frameworks, Vitalik introduced an analysis perspective of "concavity and convexity problems," arguing that different types of issues require different governance structures: scenarios leaning towards consensus and robustness should emphasize broad participation and resistance to manipulation; while scenarios requiring decisive decision-making should allow for leadership, balanced by decentralized mechanisms.Vitalik further pointed out that for DAOs to truly function, they must address two major challenges: privacy and decision fatigue, and can leverage privacy technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and multi-party computation, as well as AI and consensus-based communication tools to alleviate governance burdens. He emphasized that AI should not replace human judgment but should serve as a tool to amplify and assist human intentions.Finally, Vitalik stated that future DAO designs need to consider governance mechanisms, privacy technologies, and communication layers as core components rather than auxiliary modules, to ensure that the decentralization and robustness of Ethereum's underlying infrastructure are sustained in its upper-layer applications.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on social media, discussing how the development history of Visa provides insights for modern decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). He pointed out that Visa had a decentralized concept similar to today's DAOs at its inception. However, many people now view it as an exploitative or oppressive institution.

ChainCatcher news, Jupiter co-founder Meow posted on the X platform that finding the perfect balance between corporate goals and community engagement is indeed very difficult. Due to Jupiter's previous inability to handle this dynamic well, there has been a lot of confusion, anger, and misunderstanding recently, and debates can easily arise between corporate goals and community engagement.Therefore, Jupiter is studying the balance issue between teams/DAOs and will have in-depth discussions in the coming weeks.

ChainCatcher news, daos.fun announced the launch of Founder DAOs, a decentralized fundraising DAO similar to KickStarter, which supports projects in fields such as art, AI, and finance to raise funds and govern through token communities.Creators need to set the DAO token, description, fundraising allocation, and team shares, with an initial minting of 10 billion tokens, of which 4 billion will be publicly sold through a Bonding Curve. The team allocation will be locked and migrated to Raydium after the fundraising is completed, and the community fund pool will be controlled by voting. After successful fundraising, liquidity will be migrated to Raydium and the DAO S pool, and the team and fundraising allocation will start to be released 3 months after the migration to Raydium, but some tokens can be sold early to long-term holders.

ChainCatcher news, DAO launch platform daos.fun core member baoskee published an article proposing an innovative financing model. He pointed out that currently, crypto projects generally adopt the traditional VC model where private placements precede public offerings. If this order is adjusted to public offerings first and private placements second, it could bring new advantages to projects: on one hand, it ensures allocation opportunities for large investors, and on the other hand, project parties can more selectively introduce strategically significant investors and optimize the investment structure through token vesting design.

ChainCatcher news, Bio Protocol co-founder Paul Kohhaas stated during his speech at X Space that he previously communicated with Zhao Changpeng, admitting that Bio Protocol can create about 6-7 DeSci DAOs in a year, while Zhao Changpeng believes this number is slightly low and that the time to launch an ecological project is too long. However, through continuous building, Paul Kohhaas and Bio Protocol have become increasingly familiar with the DAO launch process, and they currently hope to automate the DAO project launch process. This will significantly shorten the time required to complete the DAO launch process, leading to an increasing number of DAOs within the Bio Protocol ecosystem.Currently, their internal team has reviewed 20-30 DAOs, of which 10 DAOs have basically completed the process. It is expected that 15-20 DAOs will be cold-launched through the launchpad in Q1 of next year.

ChainCatcher news, Sky co-founder Rune Christensen stated that more effort will be devoted to fully migrating MKR to SKY by 2025, partly to help eliminate the confusion surrounding MKR and SKY. Updates and more details regarding the migration and conversion of MKR to SKY will be announced in 2025.Christensen stated that this will not put MKR holders' funds at risk, "The upcoming new proposal will require migration in order to gain usability from the token. Our goal is to ensure that both CoinGecko and exchanges only support SKY, while MKR will simply be a traditional wrapper representing each MKR=24,000 SKY."Sky also plans to launch more subDAOs, known as Stars, in 2025. Christensen mentioned that the changes in SKY's tokenomics (making it deflationary) open the door for a new Star strategy, under which more subDAOs can be launched and have operational freedom.

ChainCatcher message, Vitalik responded to comments about "the level of governance in Zuzalu, Apecoin governance forum, and Arbitrum DAO" by stating: "Technically, any currency is permissioned: you need to obtain permission from an existing holder to become a holder.This indicates that there is actually a continuous trade-off between the permission levels of Apecoin and ZuVillage, and we can imagine a structure in between: becoming a member requires obtaining permission from multiple existing members, but it is still very open.For example, you can imagine a mechanism in the style of secondary financing, weighted by existing member points, to accumulate membership points. This is what I hope to see in OP Citizen House, Zuzalu community, and other DAOs that are experimenting. Formalizing and measuring membership is upstream of any formal governance, and it would be really cool if there were more ways to achieve highly decentralized and permissionless formal membership, but not just through token holding."

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, the UAE free trade zone RAK Digital Assets Oasis (RAK DAO) plans to introduce a legal framework for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).Law firm NeosLegal and RAK DAO stated that the new system will be introduced and discussed on October 25. NeosLegal partner Irina Heaver mentioned that the framework is expected to clarify how DAOs can remain legally compliant, and she believes this will have a significant impact on decentralized governance in the UAE and the broader Web3 ecosystem.