A Taxonomy of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are trustless organizations that automate transactions, operations, and decisions without a trusted third party (Wang et al. 2019). So far, this research area is missing a taxonomy that investigates the different dimensions and characteristics of DAOs and the many different forms they can take. This paper addresses this research gap by creating a data-driven taxonomy analyzing 72 DAOs. In doing so, we identify the three main categories treasury, community, and governance, seven sub-categories, 20 dimensions, and 53 characteristics. In addition, we provide dimensions with inadmissible characteristics DAOs cannot take, as well as dimensions used to assess DAOs. The results of our agglomerative clustering are five distinct DAO types: On-chain product and service DAOs, off-chain product and service DAOs with community focus or with investor focus, investment-focused DAOs, and networking-focused community DAOs