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Are DAOs the Future of Work?

Are DAOs the Future of Work?

Oct 10, 2022

Let me tell you about the future of work. You will work on something you love without interviewing. You will work for employers paying you based on a contract you did not sign. You will compete for rewards with colleagues you don’t know, but you’ll see everything they do. You will get a say on the organization’s strategy, but so will all of its customers. You’ll be remote, global, and always "on". 

Welcome to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations — the future of work. Here are 8 ways DAOs can change the way we work👇.

1. Avoiding interviews🎙️- DAOs are permissionless: anyone can work on them. These new digital organizations have no recruitment process. No more CVs, no more cover letters : the bottoms up model and opt-in membership of DAOs invert the talent sourcing model.

2. Working for many employers at once🏢- Working for permissionless organizations means that contributors can work for one, two, or twelve DAOs. The sky is the limit. Today, corporations can discard us as they see fit. Why should we not be able to do the same?

3. A fairer way of getting paid💰- Through vote-based pay, DAOs help us experiment with new definitions of value, based on the organization's mission. As rewards are often governance tokens, contributors keep a stake in the organization’s well-being even after they’ve left it.

4. Making better decisions🗳️- Governance tokens act as shares that can be traded and as ballots to make decisions within the organization. One token is equal to one vote. Unlike classical corporations, everyone has a vote proportional to their stake in the project.

5. Value-driven work❤️- DAOs are "merely" digital communities. People come together around a set of shared values, and work to further their agenda, with the help of smart contracts. This is emergence: start with a mission, and the organization will slowly emerge around it.

6. Global / asynchronous work🌎- The gig economy today is hyper-local. DAOs makes it global. Globalization made blue-collar fight for their survival : DAOs will impact white-collar workers in the same way. By being asynchronous, they will also (finally) put an end to the 9 to 5.

7. No boss, fewer colleagues👮‍♂️- As DAOs are anonymous and global, contributors will have no colleagues. This is an opportunity for organizations to be active and deliberate when it comes to team-building. Bosses will disappear too, as you can work on whatever you like in a DAO.

8. A transparent & anonymous workplace🎭- Through blockchained contracts, DAOs are transparent / anonymous. Decisions can be audited, something few workers today are privy to. This will solve the Principal/Agent challenge corporations face... but may bring unwanted externalities.

It's unlikely that DAOs continue to rise while centralized corporations start failing. What may instead happen is the creation of a broader spectrum of corporations, with a broader spectrum of ways of working.

I hope we can keep the good in each option, and leave the bad behind.

Good luck out there.


This is a very short summary of a longer article which you can find by clicking this link. I encourage you read it if you enjoyed the above.

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