Anthony Di Iorio was a founding member of the team that built Ethereum, a network similar to bitcoin but with a Turing-complete coding language that has jumpstarted a still-nascent ecosystem of decentralized applications.
In those early days, the founders already had aspirations to someday convert the Ethereum Foundation that helps oversee the codebase into the ultimate decentralized group, better known nowadays as a distributed autonomous organization, or DAO.
But now that DAOs are real – and one has raised more than $150m worth of the cryptocurrency ether – Di Iorio says he has no plans to convert his own company, Decentral , into this kind of organization.
Di Iorio told CoinDesk: "I think that this structure is very bold and it’s not something I would be doing with my company. I believe actually in leadership. I believe you need to make quick decisions." Governance questions
Instead of a single leader, distributed autonomous organizations are essentially bundles of smart contracts capable of automatically executing whatever digital commands are encoded into their makeup.
Anyone can become a voting member of the DAO by buying tokens in exchange for ether that gives them a say in the decision a DAO makes, ranging from allocating resources to splitting off into a new organization. The largest of these, called simply The DAO, has raised funds and distributed tokens to 23,000 different voting addresses.
Di Iorio believes that a system of widely dispersed voting rights granted based on whoever is willing to spend the most on tokens — 50 addresses own 41% of the tokens, according to public data — isn’t the most efficient way to run a company.
He’s not alone. Last month, prediction market startup Gnosis proposed rebuilding The DAO’s governance model to give experts the ability to vote based on their confidence in an outcome inspired by a […]
