Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are one of the most advanced blockchain-based applications, posing many opportunities for new governance models and organizational forms. Over the past decade, the number of DAOs and their assets under management have grown exponentially. DAOs offer many opportunities and advantages for organizations, including internal organizational democratization, external actor participation, transparency, advanced auditability, autonomy and automation of business processes and decisions, higher efficiency, lower cost, increased trust, and new organizational and governance forms. DAOs are being used for a wide range of business purposes, and their various governance elements and choices that can be made provide significant flexibility in their deployment. Although there are many opportunities, DAOs can face multiple (governance) challenges as well. As there are many differences between DAOs as a result of the various choices, one cannot approach a DAO as one organizational form. The choices in governance setup, business purpose, and even the chosen infrastructure can influence the long-term viability and should be made carefully.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a fast-growing group of blockchain and smart contract-based applications. DAOs aim to serve new decentralized governance and organizational needs for various business purposes, ranging from decentralized exchanges such as UniSwap and theDAO, to R&D like VitADAO, managing infrastructures like Arbitrum, to charity funds like PactDAO. DAO projects have experienced an exponential growth over the past years. Although strongly rising in number, there is no clear consensus on what a DAO exactly entails. Additionally, despite this exponential growth, various DAO projects tend to pivot away from this form of governance or organization. They either experience a mismatch in the governance setup or the business objective, threatening their viability in the long-term. Also, as DAOs are built on blockchain infrastructure, this poses new governance challenges.
The goal of this thesis is to analyze how governance elements, business objectives and infrastructural choices can influence the long-term viability of DAOs. The main research objective of this PhD thesis is to:

“Develop a theory to explain how governance and infrastructure elements influence the long-term viability of decentralized autonomous organizations on public permissionless blockchains.”

The rapid rise in blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) offers policy-makers and decision-makers new opportunities to automatically execute decisions and processes that help enhance transparency, accountability, participation and trust. Yet, many DAOs have a limited lifespan. There is little empirical evidence of the effect of governance elements on the viability of DAOs. Using 220 on-chain governed DAOs, this paper analyses how governance elements (accountability, decision/voting, and incentives) influence the viability of DAOs in the long-term. The findings show that DAOs without weighted decision-making and without incentive structures are more viable than those with weighted decision power and incentive mechanisms. This suggests that financial and share-like DAO governance elements do not or may even negatively contribute to the long-term viability of DAOs. Also, voting power distribution is found to have a statistically significant influence on DAOs’ viability. We further propose a preliminary theory that relates governance elements to the long-term viability of DAOs. These insights will help policy-makers in designing more viable DAOs. Future research should investigate how DAO objectives, the chosen deployment infrastructure and the type of users can impact the long-term viability of DAOs.

Despite the increase in the number of blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), there is no consensus on what constitutes a DAO. This paper provides an in-depth study of DAOs by analyzing their definitions, characteristics, and emerging developments. Existing definitions in the literature hardly recognize common functionalities and intermingle coded DAOs, DAO deployment platforms, and blockchain DAOs. We developed a comprehensive DAO definition by reviewing the literature and empirically analyzing 1,859 DAOs. The findings show that many DAOs were inactive and that a threshold of 20 tokenholders is a tipping point for DAOs to survive over time and maintain sustained levels of activity. Finally, based on an empirical analysis of 9,845 perceived DAOs, we identified the emerging development of off-chain voting. This emerging development challenges the autonomous nature of DAOs. We recommend further research to investigate the effect of governance structures on their long-term sustainability and viability for both on-chain and off-chain DAOs.

Blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are systems for transacting and storing value by automatically executing a function without the need for trusted, centralized authorities. Participative budgeting requires voting about budget allocation by communities and is often confronted with issues in trust and transparency. Yet, DAOs are hardly used for participative budgeting. In this research, we introduce Decentralized Autonomous Citizen Participation Organizations (DACPOs). In a DACPO, data and actions are recorded and autonomously executed in a decentralized way. DACPOs can be used for enabling participative budgeting and thereby provide transparency, decrease the risks of fraud and corruption, and increase citizens' trust. The viability of DACPOs depends on a number of factors, including a minimum number of citizens who participate. In further research, factors influencing the use of DACPOs for participative budgeting can be further analyzed and tested.

As blockchain technology is maturing to be confidently used in practice, its applications are becoming evident and, correspondingly, more blockchain research is being published, also extending to more domains than before. To date, scientific research in the field has predominantly focused on subject areas such as finance, computer science, and engineering, while the area of service management has largely neglected this topic. Therefore, we invited a group of renowned scholars from different academic fields to share their views on emerging topics regarding blockchain in service management and service research. Their individual commentaries and conceptual contributions refer to different theoretical and domain perspectives, including managerial implications for service companies as well as forward-looking suggestions for further research.

The rise of blockchain has resulted in discussions on (new) governance models with multiple actors collaborating. Incidents and problems occurred due to flaws in blockchain protocols, smart contracts and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Often it is unclear how decisions are made concerning evolvement of blockchain applications. In this paper, we identify and analyze potential challenges regarding governance of blockchain initiatives in various types of decentralized networks using literature and case study research. The governance challenges are classified based on a framework consisting
of different layers (infrastructure, application, company and institution/country) and stages (design, operate, evolve/crisis). The results show that in various stages and layers, different challenges occur. Furthermore, blockchain applications governance and blockchain infrastructure governance were found to be entangled adding to the challenge. Our research shows a specific need
for further research into governance models for DAO applications on permissionless blockchains, linked to the products and services offered whereas in permissioned blockchains and other type of applications, existing governance models might often be feasible. For developing new governance models, we recommend learning from the lessons from the open source community.