Number of DAOs increases 8x along with spike in votes and proposals

Published at: June 10, 2022

The total number of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), the number of governance proposals put forward and the number of votes cast have all seen astounding 8-times growth over the past 12 months.

Data compiled by Snapshot Labs and shared by Electric Capital Engineer Emre Caliskan in a Thursday tweet highlighted that DAO numbers have increased by 8.8 times, from 700 in May 2021 to 6,000 now. The number of proposals has increased by 8.5 times, and the number of total votes has increased by 8.3 times over the past 12 months, from 448,000 to 3.7 million.

1/ DAO governance activity is exploding . In the last year, we have seen:• 8.8x in # of DAOs• 8.5x in # of proposals• 8.3x in # of votes Here are 10+ key insights from @SnapshotLabs data on DAO governance pic.twitter.com/45KAOeER5y

— Emre ⚡ (@n4motto) June 8, 2022

Snapshot is a decentralized governance participation portal where DAO members can propose new initiatives and vote on them. The data was compiled in collaboration with Electric Capital, a Web3 investment firm.

While the findings look promising for decentralized governance models, the increase in participation was driven by just a small handful of the most active DAOs. New proposals mostly came from just 10% of DAOs, while 60% of DAOs have had three or fewer proposals since their inception.

Nevertheless, the overall growth is an impressive show of confidence in the DAO structure.

Rival DAO tracking tool DeepDAO has slightly different figures and shows there are only 4,833 DAOS as of Friday.

Related: ApeCoin DAO officially favors remaining within Ethereum ecosystem

Caliskan attributed the increase in new proposals to the popularity and wide coverage of ConstitutionDAO. It was an organization set up last November with the intent of buying an original copy of the United States Constitution. The DAO was outbid at the last moment, but it proved the power such organizations can have.

According to DeepDAO, PancakeSwap and Decentraland are the two top DAOs by proposal count, with 3,300 and 1,200, respectively. Only the top 72 organizations have at least 100 proposals at the time of writing.

Despite the overall promising numbers in DAO growth, a Tuesday draft bill from the U.S. Senate could curtail their growth if no changes are made to it. It initially calls for all crypto projects to register with the government and reveal the identities of their users and founders.

Tags
Decentralization
Adoption
Defi
Voting
Dao
Related Posts
DAOs will be the future of online communities in five years
Online communities, those that share a common interest on the internet, can range from social networks, grassroots organizations and customer communities. We, as a society, are naturally communal, so it makes sense to engage in ideas and interests with others online. Whether we build relationships with people directly or indirectly, communities are built. However, how we do so differs. In 2006, web expert Jakob Nielsen proposed a 90-9-1 rule based on participation inequality in social media and online communities. According to Nielsen, in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers, i.e., those who observe, but don’t contribute, nine percent …
Decentralization / Oct. 23, 2021
Adapt or die: Venture capital vs. crypto, blockchain, DAOs and Web 3.0
We have seen a steep adoption of crypto-based systems this year, including decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) such as digital art, crypto-centric gaming, and increased adoption of cryptocurrencies as investment and payment tools. One of the more recent developments is the emergence of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). DAOs have existed since 2016, when The DAO organization, a new form of investment vehicle that attracted a sizable portion of Ethereum (ETH) tokens, raised more than $150 million at the time. Many saw The DAO as the ultimate form of human coordination. Yet, due to a reentrancy exploit, hackers stole …
Decentralization / Nov. 14, 2021
BitDAO launches $200M zkDAO to advance Ethereum scaling via zkSync
On Thursday, a proposal to fund decentralized autonomous organization zkDAO passed via treasury protocol BitDAO with close to 200 million votes cast. The proposal was authored by Matter Labs — the organization behind Ethereum scaling protocol zkSync — and Mirana Ventures. Utilizing zk-Rollups, zkSync and its family of technologies will build layer-2 infrastructure capable of returning succinct proofs to the Ethereum network without sending the entire data. The result, if implemented, would mean a vastly speedier network. Zero-knowledge-based solutions have attracted much attention in recent months due to recurrently high levels of congestion on Ethereum, as well as exuberant gas …
Decentralization / Jan. 27, 2022
The evolution of DAOs and why they are expected to take hold in 2022
In 2021, crypto has been one of the biggest trends shaping tech and finance, and according to mainstream news headlines, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are set to be a force to be reckoned with in crypto in 2022. Mark Cuban called them the “ultimate combination of capitalism and progressivism.” Yet, while DAOs are relatively easy to understand conceptually, they’re a segment of the crypto market in a state of rapid flux, with many innovative use cases emerging. However, setting up and running a DAO also comes with its own set of unique challenges, which are also changing and developing over …
Decentralization / Feb. 12, 2022
What the media is missing about decentralized autonomous organizations
The New York Times: “Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision.” Bloomberg: “The Next Crypto Bust May Be Spelled D-A-O.” The Guardian: “Are blockchain-based DAOs really a utopian revolution in the making?” Seemingly every week, another old-guard media outlet echoes the talking points of defenders of the status quo financial system who fear and distrust the economic opportunities that will be unlocked through the power of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). While publications are right to recognize the unsurprising early growing pains of DAOs, this sort of hand-wringing misses the forest for the trees when it comes to the impact of …
Decentralization / April 2, 2022