Background:  

Blockchain technology has enabled a new phenomenon, so-called decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). DAO members need to take decisions either for the daily business (e.g.,investments) or for developing organisational structures (e.g.,protocol changes) and for this, DAOs have implemented a variety of decision-making processes in which members vote on proposals submitted by the community. While experimenting with different voting mechanisms, these DAOs generate a large amount of data. This provides for research opportunities in the field of digital voting as well as digital democracy in general. 

Research Question and Methodology: 

The project aims at contributing to a better understanding of the decision-making dynamics in DAOs and to articulate learnings as inputs for a digital democracy in the making. Our general research question is: To what extent are DAO-based voting mechanisms pioneering new forms of decision-making, which could support or even transform general forms of decision-making that are useful in democratic settings? The general working hypotheses is that DAO-based voting mechanisms provide a value-added for the future conceptualisation of digital democracies. We expect our results to support this hypothesis at least regarding certain elements of decision-making in digital democracies. An interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, economists, and democracy researchers addresses the research question by applying a multiple case study approach to collect voting data from different DAOs. Such data can be collected directly from blockchain platforms, but also from webpages that provide tools to facilitate voting in DAOs. We are also going to conduct interviews with representatives of DAOs, e.g., developers, founding members, and token holders to better understand the context. In the end, we will provide guidelines and learnings for the design of voting in digital democracies. 

Research Team: 

The project builds on a interdisciplinary Team: 


– The UZH Blockchain Center will extend its already existing technical framework for collecting blockchain data to include data on DAO voting and apply its expertise in network science and modelling to analyse voting dynamics; 


– The ZHAW Institute for Organisational Viability is going to structure and categorise the DAO landscape along different voting mechanisms and conduct interviews with DAO representatives; 


– The UZH Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau (ZDA) will apply learnings for digital democracy based on DAO voting approaches.

The project will bring Switzerland a step further in developing effective policies for a digital democracy.