A vision of IOTA´s future ecosystem — The DAO-landscape

A vision of IOTA´s future ecosystem — The DAO-landscape

Some say they are the next step in the evolution of society and business: The Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Groups of people from all over the world are starting to organize themselves using distributed ledger technologies (DLT), such as blockchains, DAGs and smart contracts, in order to start decentralized businesses, investment groups, charity movements or social clubs.

DAOs come in all shapes and forms and they differ widely in their goals, inner structures and legal frameworks. However, they all share a promise to combine individual freedom and economic opportunities with community and a sense shared values. Modern DLTs enable DAOs to transparently manage shared crypto-wallets and to perform democratic votes — even in permissionless, highly fluctuating and often times anonymous groups of people.

Currently, most DAOs run on blockchains like Ethereum or xDAI. But now a new platform is entering the conversation: IOTA with its new IOTA smart contracts.

How could the future of IOTAs DAO-ecosystem look like?

Vision I: The DAO-landscape will be pluralistic

People will organize themselves to accomplish many different kinds of tasks — from business and investments to charity and social activities. They will vary greatly in structure, size and goals and therefore there will not be “one DAO to rule them all”. Let´s first have a look into what kinds of DAOs already exist in other ecosystems as of today — and exchange some ideas on how equivalents in IOTAs ecosystem could look like. This is by no means intended to be a exhaustive review of the vast DAO-landscapes out there, but rather a gentle primer to start to get into the topic.