Blockchain-Based Technology in Corporate Governance

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have become an indispensable part of digital infrastructure in recent years. The unique organizational characteristics and functional structure empower them to become an effective tool for solving corporate governance issues, including contract risks, principal-agent dilemmas, etc. However, DAOs themselves also face a variety of governance issues. On one hand, as a new economic organization model, the existing corporate governance theories and methods are no longer fully applicable to DAOs. On the other hand, unpredictable logic vulnerabilities and code loopholes in the governance mechanism might cause devastating damage to DAOs. The parallel intelligence theory based on the ACP method (i.e., artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution) is an elegant research paradigm and a practical approach tailored to solving these challenges. As such, we propose a novel parallel governance framework for DAOs based on the parallel intelligence theory and further discuss its technical methodology and implementation model. Furthermore, we construct a parallel governance system for GnosisDAO and conduct computational experiments to validate the effectiveness of its governance mechanism. The experimental results not only confirm the defects of the GnosisDAO governance mechanism but also illustrate parallel governance as a useful research direction to solve existing governance problems of DAOs.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based entities that pool digital assets, automate governance through smart contracts, and enable collective decision-making, challenging traditional corporate structures. By removing hierarchies and centralized control, DAOs promote transparency and global participation, while raising complex questions around liability, governance, and regulation in the digital age. This authoritative volume places DAOs within the framework of corporate law, offering a rigorous, interdisciplinary analysis of their evolution and potential. Written by a global team of scholars from the US, UK, continental Europe, Australia, and Asia, the book combines cutting-edge blockchain research with legal expertise. It traces DAOs from their idealistic origins as code-based systems designed to replace traditional law, to practical adaptations in Swiss associations and bespoke legal forms in US states such as Wyoming. Key chapters explore legal debates, historical parallels with early corporations, and governance innovations that expand participation while testing accountability. Case studies highlight DAOs’ diversity and adaptive governance, while additional chapters address bankruptcy, international law, dispute resolution, collective investment, and DeFi regulation. Forward-looking perspectives consider DAOs’ legal integration, limitations, and emerging intersections with AI. Ideal for academics, policymakers, investors, and professionals navigating Web3, Foundations of Decentralized Organizations: Blockchain and the Future of Corporate Law reveals DAOs’ transformative potential to reshape corporate law and organizational design.

The development of Bitcoin and its underlying technology blockchain has enabled a new phenomenon called decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). DAOs can be perceived as self-governing organizations whose management is based on programmed and encoded rules on a decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer network. These DAOs typically manage and allocate funds, often in the form of cryptocurrencies. However, in recent years, a variety of DAOs have been established to provide services (e.g., currency exchange, project financing), curate collections (e.g., art collections), or own and manage real assets (e.g., land). Currently, DAO literature focuses mainly on online communities managing digital assets; however, DAOs owning physical properties differ from them in localized communities, asset indivisibility, and additional complexity in collective acquisition, ownership, limited physical capacity, and decentralized governance. Such property-owning DAOs are interesting, because they fuel the transition from purely online organizations into organizations integrating with the physical world. From an organizational system theory perspective this article explores how a DAO owning properties could be designed by exploring three DAO projects that own properties. Applying a conceptual research design, we first identify DAO Design Principles obtained by traditional organizational system theory, followed by examining and describing the core organizational principles for property-owning DAOs. Based on a comprehensive discussion of the conceptual findings, we present a research agenda for further studies on DAOs owning properties.

The article analyses legislative initiatives aimed at regulating the use of blockchain in corporate governance. The tokenisation equity opens up new opportunities for companies to attract investment. As a result, many traditional companies are interested in converting traditional securities into security tokens. Countries aspiring to lead the blockchain industry are seeking to establish a legal framework for security tokens and a blockchain-based registration system for them. The use of blockchain brings with it not only the digital transformation of companies, but also the emergence of a new type of organization - decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Existing legal forms are not appropriate for the DAO, which requires the creation of a new type of legal entity. Changes to corporate law that address these trends will eliminate legal risk and drive digital transformation of companies

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent a new form of economic organization, leveraging smart contracts and blockchain technology to manage financial operations, governance, and decision-making. This structure eliminates the need for centralized intermediaries. From an accounting and economic perspective, this article investigates DAOs, offering a comprehensive examination of their architecture, voting methods, governance procedures, smart contract vulnerabilities, and the legal environment. The article proposes a five-tiered DAO structure, demonstrating how each layer contributes to operational efficiency, transparency, and decentralized responsibility. The study emphasizes the importance of smart contract auditing tools in ensuring reliable financial transactions. According to the data presented in the study, applying traditional accounting principles to token-based transactions, decentralized decision systems, and DAO treasuries poses significant challenges such as token valuation, revenue recognition, and the absence of standardized reporting formats. The study explains how DAOs act as economic coordinators, using real-world case studies such as MakerDAO, Gitcoin DAO, and Uniswap DAO. Additionally, the research highlights the issues DAOs face regarding valuation and compliance. This article concludes with a policy-focused examination of regulatory gaps and offers suggestions for future research directions in the areas of financial integration, legal categorization, and the sustainability of DAOs. Through the integration of institutional and economic theory with the technical structure of DAOs, this research advances our understanding of DAOs as novel forms of finance and governance.

Decentralization holds a significant role in the context of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), with its nature being not a fixed value but a comparative spectrum. Prior research investigating the measurement of decentralization in nations’ governance system provides a foundation for our current study. This research aims to integrate these insights to define dimensions and indicators, tailored explicitly for assessing decentralization levels within DAOs. Then, the article undertakes an examination of the suitability of traditional decentralization measurement approaches within the unique DAO context, employing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) as our analytical tool based on a total of 44 DAOs. Hence, the results suggest that DAOs have three dimensions for measuring decentralization, ‘political decentralization as a participatory engagement’, ‘economic decentralization as a resource distribution’, and ‘administrative decentralization as the self-governing execution of decisions’. By substantiating the applicability of established decentralization measurement frameworks within the unique context of DAOs, the findings not only enhance the understanding of this emergent governance paradigm but also provide DAO practitioners, policymakers, and researchers with invaluable insights.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), like blockchains, were expected to revolutionize the economy by solving the principal–agent problem in the corporate form. Yet, the very first DAO (“The DAO”) suffered a catastrophic hack that led to the Ethereum blockchain’s forking. Despite this failure, and the 2022 crypto markets collapse, enthusiasm for DAOs as corporate alternatives persists in crypto circles. Nine years on, however, DAOs remain a niche structure with little traction outside crypto projects. This chapter posits that this is due to fundamental flaws in the case for DAOs as corporate replacements. Crypto proponents often dismiss centralization and opacity as wholly undesirable, overlooking their functional value in business organizations. They also fail to recognize that blockchain’s security, transparency, and predictability are narrowly bound and come at a cost, rendering DAOs poorly equipped to handle the risks organizations face in the real world. These trade-offs explain why DAOs are less a revolution, more naïve wishful thinking.

Information and communication technologies are an important cohesive factor in developing global economy and binding up capital markets. Corporate governance has its place in the process of creation of new capital flows. Financial instrument markets are connected in their existence with relevant information and their dissemination, so that information technologies contribute to the efficiency of their organization and functioning. By its nature, technological changes, which influence the market, encourage the change of structure and processes which make the system of corporate governance. Application of new technologies helps easier problem solution regarding numerous corporate governance issues such as: rational apathy of shareholders, principal-agent problem, transparency, information transfer, etc. The application of technology within a public company should help in distribution of corporate power and contribute to balance of numerous divergent interests within a company, which is very important in terms of achieving primary goal – providing long-term well-being of the shareholders and the public company. On the external plan, application of technology can contribute to better quality of relations among the participants on the capital market. New technologies should help public companies to be successful in a long run by providing more efficient functioning of corporate governance by encouraging shareholders to effectively use their rights. Inability, disinterestedness and inertia of the shareholders will open doors to activities which direct company resources towards satisfying other interests (e.g. management interests) but not interests of the shareholders. Application of information technology can contribute significantly to more effective protection of both basic rights of the shareholders and higher level of more complex managerial enterprises (effective shareholders assembly, material distribution, accepting agenda, discussing and exercising voting power of all shareholders, particularly important for cross-border shareholders, voting in absence etc. The Internet and other technologies provide opportunity for everyday interactive communication between the public company and the shareholders. Interactive communication through on-line forums on the Internet provides instantaneous access of great number of shareholders and an opportunity to find answers on questions they are concerned with in a more effective way. The use of new technologies can reduce these costs of communication in a great deal, for it is possible to send piles of documents important for assembly sessions and decision making to an endless number of e-mail addresses (financial reports, auditor’s report, supervisory board report, board of directors report regarding business operations of the company, as well as reports on corporate governance).

The advent of blockchain technology has paved the way for numerous innovations in online governance, with decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) emerging as a prominent development, often referred to as “digital jurisdictions.” Despite experiencing remarkable growth, currently boasting nearly 7M users and $18 billion in assets, DAOs remain relatively underexplored in the existing literature, particularly from an empirical perspective. This study presents a comprehensive framework comprising 15 dimensions to categorize DAOs based on their operational domain, purpose, scope, voting process, and utilization of crypto-tokens. By applying this categorization schema to 40 DAO communities hosted on the Aragon platform, encompassing over 423 000 participants and managing treasuries worth $960M, we shed light on the prevailing characteristics of these DAOs. Contrary to assertions made by blockchain enthusiasts, our analysis reveals that DAOs predominantly operate in financial and technological domains, primarily offering blockchain-based services. Additionally, our investigation into their governance structure exposes limitations in terms of democratic participation, as decision-making power typically correlates with the number of tokens owned by the voter, resembling plutocracies rather than true democracies. We believe these findings will facilitate researchers’ comprehension of this innovative form of governance and aid practitioners in designing future DAOs with greater effectiveness. Furthermore, our analysis can be replicated on other platforms or at different time periods to validate and contrast our conclusions.

Web3-DAO: An ontology for decentralized autonomous organizations

Blockchain-based technologies have emerged as a mechanism for governing sustainability in agro-food supply chain, where voluntary sustainability standards have been the main governance mechanisms over the past decades. Despite a growing body of research on blockchain-based technologies, the relationship between these two mechanisms for supply chains remains poorly understood. Therefore, this study aims at addressing this research gap and explaining their interaction. We described and assessed 16 cases of blockchain-based technologies and voluntary sustainability standards against twelve sustainability-related assessment criteria. The results show that the relationship between blockchain-based technologies and voluntary sustainability standards can be co-existing, synergistic, and antagonistic. While most cases fall under the co-existing relationship, we identified a few cases with synergistic relationships, and one case with an antagonistic relationship. We explain each type of relation and show how the system architecture and goal of a blockchain-based technology implementation are key determinants of this relationship. This study can support stakeholders in agro-food supply chain in better understanding the application of blockchain-based technologies for sustainability governance in relation to existing voluntary sustainability standards. It can further inform those stakeholders of possibilities to constructively collaborate and focus on positive social and environmental impacts within agro-food supply chains.

EUGENE FAMA and Michael Jensen's treatment of the "Separation of Ownership and Control" is both insightful and informative. It deepens our understanding of corporate control, and the analysis of residual claimants usefully extends the economics of internal organization to include partnerships, mutuals, nonprofits, and the like. The basic argument is this: specialized governance structures arise in response to the efficiency needs of each type of organization. This is an important argument and one with which I broadly concur. They couple this, however, with a strong suggestion that these structures have reached a high degree of refinement-on which account there is not now, if indeed there ever has been, an organization control problem with which scholars and others are legitimately concerned. On this point I have grave doubts. My discussion of the paper addresses three issues: What is the relation, if any, of the hierarchical organization of the firm to economic performance? What relation, if any, does residual claimant status have to the composition and character of the board of directors? And is there now or has there ever been a corporate control problem? I deal with each of these issues in order.

Research Context: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) emerge as innovative structures operating on blockchain infrastructures, providing transparency, decentralization, and autonomy in digital governance and coordination processes. Scientific and/or Practical Problem: Despite their transformative potential, DAO face significant obstacles, such as scalability limitations, risks of power concentration, legal ambiguities, and complex incentive models. Proposed Solution and/or Analysis: This study investigates recent scientific literature on DAO, seeking to understand their current state, focusing on how they have been conceptualized, characterized, evaluated, and applied. Related IS Theory: The research draws on the wisdom of crowd theory, which explains how collective decision-making can overcome individual choices, and sociotechnical theory, which emphasizes the interaction between technological infrastructures and social structures. Together, these perspectives frame DAO as hybrid systems that integrate algorithmic processes with collective human governance. Research Method: A systematic mapping study was conducted, encompassing the collection, selection, and coding of 47 primary studies published in relevant scientific sources. Summary of Results: The results highlight the conceptual consensus on the decentralized and smart contract-based nature of DAO, propose categories of structural challenges, and map recurring application domains, such as decentralized finance (DeFi), open science, energy, and digital art. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the transition of DAO from algorithmic entities to sociotechnical hybrids, connected to emerging trends such as the metaverse, NFTs, and decentralized artificial intelligence. Contributions and Impact to IS area: This study provides an updated theoretical foundation for the IS area, mapping the state of the art of DAO, identifying structural challenges, and emphasizing their evolution toward hybrid models. Most importantly, it reveals the complexity and originality of uniting the three main pillars of information systems (code, governance, and automated processes), thus contributing to the design of more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable digital governance systems in emerging decentralized ecosystems.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are attracting interest from various disciplines, particularly business and economics, and computer science. However, much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where each observer sees only part of the phenomenon, DAO research has largely remained fragmented across disciplines, limiting a comprehensive understanding of the potential of DAOs. This paper investigates to which extent DAO scholarship has achieved meaningful interdisciplinary integration. We address this question through an analysis of knowledge flows between Business and Economics and Computer Science, using citation network analysis, topic modelling, and outlet analysis. We find that while DAOs generate vibrant interdisciplinary discourse, the interactions remain predominantly applied and case-driven, with limited theoretical integration. By mapping interdisciplinary exchanges, we highlight key gaps and opportunities for greater synthesis across fields. We argue that strengthening the alignment between organizational and technical insights is crucial for advancing DAO research and fostering a more cohesive interdisciplinary framework.

Blockchain technology and smart contracts are catalysts for decentralization and disintermediation. These new technologies reduce transaction costs, agency costs, and offer a basis for trustless social and economic interactions. They are fueling new business models for decentralized platforms and have revolutionized crowdfunding. A recent trend, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), stands to fundamentally transform organizing and governance. DAOs are blockchain-native, decentralized organizations that are collectively owned and managed by their members via smart contracts. In this note, we assess the promises and challenges of DAOs, with a focus on decentralized governance and disintermediation, and offer a first empirical glimpse at the rise and functioning of DAOs. Overall, DAOs may introduce a new era in organizational economics, transforming the global corporate landscape from hierarchical organizations to democratic and distributed organizations powered by organizational entrepreneurship and innovations.