Smart contracts’ governance: A new order for economic activity?

Recently, a new form of organization—a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)—has emerged as a novel form of governance. DAO is an organization represented by programmed operating rules that determine who can execute changes to the rules of applications built on blockchains. Through ownership of governance tokens, DAO grants its stakeholders such as users, developers, and contributors a voice in the DAO’s governance process. Today, many decentralized applications that apply blockchain technologies such as DeFi choose to rely on DAOs for their governance, specifically, to submit proposals and to cast votes on decisions. It is essential to start to investigate the new and fast-growing area of decentralized governance and its implications for the future of DeFi and the emergence of crypto asset class. Despite DAOs’ appealing vision of “decentralized governance”, there is little empirical evidence based on investigating governance issues that arise in blockchains. Our research project will provide an initial step towards understanding governance of decentralized applications built on blockchains such as DeFi. The proposed research will allow Aquanow to contribute to the blockchain and DeFi communities by understanding the governance structure and current risks embedded in DAOs.

Faculty Supervisor:

Jan Bena

Student:

Partner:

AquaNow

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: