2021 is the year when the entire blockchain industry ushers in a big explosion. As the DAO with blockchain as the underlying core, it naturally shows a trend of explosive growth, and this trend is still expanding.
According to statistics, in the entire blockchain network, there were more than 700 DAOs with valid proposals at the beginning of 2021. As of April 2022, the number has exceeded 6,000, an increase of nearly 8.8 times. The rapid growth in the number of DAO proposals also reflects the strong interest and active participation in the decentralized governance model. More people began to try to explore this new model of decision-making governance.
In DAO, democratic decision-making is usually achieved through voting. From May 2021 to May 2022, the number of people participating in DAO voting governance has increased from 448,000 to 3.7 million.
However, there may be some unsatisfactory aspects of the initial DAO. 50% of users only participated in one governance vote, while 75% of users only participated in one DAO vote. This set of data also reflects a reality. The concept and imagination of DAO are very attractive, but at present, many functions of DAO are not perfect, and it will take some time for further exploration and practice.
Among these voters, there is a very interesting phenomenon. Some early participants have now become loyal "fans" of DAO, and several of them have more than 2,000 voting rights. It can be said that this group of talents is the backbone of the DAO development process.
The degree of decentralization of DAO is a very important measure. It is precisely because of its characteristics of "decentralization" and "democracy" that it is more attractive. In the DAO, @optimismPBC once directly removed a proposal made by @cobie. In theory, in a DAO, no one party has the right to control anyone else. This incident attracted the attention of many people and greatly reduced the trust of DAO. People also understand from this incident that the degree of decentralization of the current DAO is limited, and there is still a long way to go before true democracy.
DAO adopts the standard "Gini coef" to measure the degree of decentralization of the organization, ranging from 0 to 1, which respectively refer to the degree of decentralization, where 0 means highly decentralized and 1 means highly centralized. Many of the voting mechanisms adopted by the current DAOs have a certain degree of centralization, that is, a small number of powerful voters have more voice. According to analysis, about 25% of the DAO proposals have a Gini coef index higher than 0.8.
Although the current DAO centralization degree is relatively high, it can be seen from the development of this year that DAO is developing in a better direction. The average Gini coef has dropped from 0.81 to 0.62, and the degree of decentralization is deepening.
