Worldwide interest in decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) has remained resilient despite the chill of the ongoing crypto winter.
The appetite for DAOs has not tumbled with the global crypto market; new data from the data analytics firm DeepDAO suggests.
The company’s data indicates a key detachment between crypto’s declining value and the creation of new DAOs.
Accordingly, over 2,850 DAOs began governance activities between May and October this year. This figure is more than twice the number from 2021.
As represented in the above graph, more DAOs were launched this year on a month-by-month basis than in 2021.
However, November and December 2021 are the exception to this, when 1,185 and 903 new DAOs were launched respectively.
Researchers attribute the peak of the bull market as a catalyst of these figures.
The company’s analysis characterises a DAO as ‘new’ based on when its first proposal was created.
“First proposal seems to be the most indicative measure of when a group becomes a DAO, although a more granular approach is needed,” the data analytics firm tweeted.
The biggest players
To recap, unlike a traditional company where decisions are made by the C-suite, DAOs disperse power among shareholders. Likewise, the organisation’s profits are proportionally divided among its members.
A DAO decentralises decision-making by releasing on-chain governance tokens. With these, each member votes upon matters directly through rules specified in the blockchain programming code. Off-chain is when this process happens outside of the platform.
With regard to governance and DAO voting, the data points to Snapshot Labs is currently responsible for the largest number of new DAOs for their off-chain voting.
Notable names in the on-chain voting area include Compound Finance, Aragon, Solana and Substrate.
Over at the broader DAO market, there are more than 10,000 decentralised organisations, with a total treasury of $8.8 billion.
Uniswap is currently leading the pack with a treasury of about $2.3billion. BitDAO and ENS have a treasury size of $1.7billion and $995million, respectively.
However, in terms of the number of token holders, Polkadot appears to be more decentralised, with about 1.1 million holders. Uniswap comes third on this metric, having over 330,000 token holders.
A glimpse into the future?
Eyal Eithcowich, DeepDAO’s founder and CEO, believes these numbers show that DAOs have a strong product market fit in crypto, alongside DeFi and NFTs.
“The fact that more and more groups of people choose to become a DAO, or at a minimum explore becoming a DAO, is also a reflection of the world at large,” he explains.
“In our increasingly connected world, people recognise the importance of working together and using technological infrastructure for doing so,” Eithcowich continues. “There is still a lot more space to grow.”
With over 600 million Facebook groups and over 60 million companies on LinkedIn, Eithcowich explains that if only a fraction of these become DAOs, “we’re looking at millions of DAOs. Maybe the growth numbers we found in the current ecosystem hint that this will indeed happen.”
