Decentralised Decision-Making in DAOs: Learnings for Digital Democracy

Blockchain technology has enabled a new phenomenon, so-called decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). DAOs can be defined as self-governing organisations whose administrative logic is implemented via smart contracts on a blockchain. DAO members need to take decisions either for the daily business (e.g., investments) or for developing organisational structures (e.g., protocol changes) and for this, DAOs have implemented a variety of decision-making processes in which members vote on proposals submitted by the community. While experimenting with different voting mechanisms, these DAOs generate a large amount of data. This provides for research opportunities in the field of digital voting as well as digital democracy in general. The project builds on a interdisciplinary approach: The UZH Blockchain Center will extend its already existing technical framework for collecting blockchain data to include data on DAO voting and apply its expertise in network science and modelling to analyse voting dynamics; the ZHAW Institute for Organizational Viability is going to structure and categorise the DAO landscape along different voting mechanisms and  conduct interviews with DAO representatives; the UZH Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau (ZDA) will apply learnings for digital democracy based on DAO voting approaches.

The Decentralised Decision-Making in DAOs Project involves partners from University of Zurich (Blockchain Center), the Center for Democracy Studies Aarau (ZDA) and the ZHAW (School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering). It is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2024-2027). The researchers involved are Claudio Tessone (UZH BCC), Uwe Serdült (UZH-ZDA) and Franz Röösli (ZHAW).