Challenges Facing DAOs — and How to Solve Them

DAOs—decentralized autonomous organizations—have the potential to upend traditional corporations, but there are a LOT of problems that need to be figured out:

The Incentive Problem: DAO incentives make it easier to coordinate people, but can also turn them into mercenaries who might game the system to benefit themselves.
The Stakeholder Problem: If everyone in a DAO has an equal vote, how is anything really going to get done? Should DAOs really be run like a democracy?
The Vibe Problem: Strong communities come from strong vibes, but when you start compensating community members you start eroding the vibes. Can DAO communities truly survive tokenization?

The list goes on, and the questions are important. That’s why we’re hosting a discussion in the Every Discord this week about these problems, and how they might be solved.

We’ll be joined by David Phelps, founder of ecodao, investor in web3 at cowfund, and writer on web3 at davidphelps.substack.com. In this conversation we’ll cover a bit about what makes DAOs promising in comparison to a traditional corporation, but also we’ll some of problems DAOs face, and discuss what might be done.