The DAO is considered to be a decentralized, autonomous, organization, but some say it is neither. It certainly is not an organization in the traditional sense of the word. In its foundations the DAO is literally code. It is not autonomous as the DAO cannot quite operate by itself and its decentralized aspect is now being questioned. How great is DAO curators’ power?
As with any decentralized protocol, the DAO has a 51% attack vector. A user who controls the majority of total tokens can steal all of DAO’s money, running away with the funds of 49% token holders.
To prevent this attack, the role of curators was created, tasked with whitelisting smart contract business proposal addresses. Although this may seem innocuous, the events of the past week indicate that they hold far greater power than many thought.
Vlad Zamfir , one of the DAO curators, stated in a post before adding that some expect the curators to protect the DAO from attacks and have a greater responsibility: “My understanding was my responsibilities were solely to be a certificate authority that checks whether payment addresses are truly associated with proposals and that contract addresses truly have EVM that corresponds with the advertised Solidity code.” De facto moratorium
The 12 curators, mostly ethereum programmers, have implemented a de facto moratorium, essentially freezing all DAO activity, because a number of attack vectors have been exposed. As solutions are proposed, the undefined role of the curators has been raised as a topic of concern.
Zamfir told Epicenter Bitcoin : “[C]urators can whitelist proposals, but if there is a yes bias then they are choosing who the money goes to by deciding the order in which proposals go forward.” Vlad Zamfir Alex van de Sande , one of the curators, listed his whitelisting criteria in […]
