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Scientific inquiry is another area of impact. Decentralized science (DeSci) is a new DAO-based approach to power human effort in fields from medical devices and pharmaceuticals to artificial intelligence and climate science. DePin refers to decentralized physical infrastructure networks that incentivize many different owners of physical or digital resources like computing power and storage into a user-owned network that can harness more capability than their centralized counterparts. The list goes on.

Management science and our best practices for governing and managing today assume the traditional concept of the firm. How many leading thinkers are aware that management as we know it is about to change? How can a DAO adopt an effective strategy without a top decision-maker? How do people or AI agents plan projects? What are the new rules for engaging talent? How do DAOs get users to participate in governance so that they don't just get captured by their biggest and most vocal stakeholders? Can we create a workable policy framework that allows DAOs to thrive? What happens to the four Rs of the industrial-age human resources department—recruit, retrain, retain, and reward—in a decentralized firm? How does governance work when big decisions are traditionally made by boards of directors?

Exploring these questions motivates this book, How to DAO. This practical handbook to the new model of value creation is packed with good examples and sensible advice on creating a DAO, making it work, benefiting from it, and keeping yourself and colleagues out of trouble. As such, it is one of the early important contributions to rethinking business strategy and management science.

Read on, buckle up, and prosper.

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Don Tapscott, CM, is (with Alex Tapscott) the coauthor of the global bestseller Blockchain Revolution and cofounder of the Blockchain Research Institute, which advises business and government leaders in many countries. The author of eighteen widely read books about the digital age, Tapscott is an adjunct professor at INSEAD and a chancellor emeritus at Trent University. His (second) TED Talk on blockchain has 7.5 million views on TED.com alone.

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered why bureaucrats have the power to print money at will, potentially eroding your savings? Or how New York-based private-equity investors can monopolize critical infrastructure, siphoning resources from the communities they're meant to serve? Why is it that social networks can deplatform us, or steal our data to sell to advertisers, without any due process or compensation? What would be possible if we could build digital community-owned goods and services? Much like a fish oblivious to the water it inhabits, you've likely never truly contemplated the traditional financial system in which we live and operate. It appears to be a constant and "normal" state of being.

In this book we urge you to challenge this assumption, scrutinize the environment you're immersed in, and confront what is "normal." The legacy financial realm has been captured by powerful actors. Crypto shows us an alternative path. In many ways, crypto represents the next Occupy Wall Street movement: an opportunity to go bankless. But now the movement has matured and become more sophisticated. And now it has the tools to effectively coordinate.

How does this movement organize? Through decentralized autonomous organizations, more commonly known as DAOs. There are many types of DAOs: investment DAOs, social DAOs, service DAOs, impact DAOs—just to name a few. Some feel like charitable organizations, some like social clubs; some feel like a workplace, while some resemble more of a dispersed network than a cohesive organization. Others feel more like a religion. Some have failed, and some have massively succeeded. There are DAOs that move millions of dollars every month, and there are DAOs that are ghost towns— the people have all left, but the code continues to run.

While there are many flavors of DAOs, the one thing they all have in common is the ability to share assets, share power, and share cryptographically verifiable truth with anyone who has an internet connection.

Just as the types of DAOs vary widely, so do the motivations to join a DAO. You might join a DAO to make friends. Maybe you want to make some extra money. Maybe you just want to learn the tech. Maybe you are thinking of launching a start-up. Maybe you're tired of the old way of doing things and want to find new opportunities in a new world. Maybe you have found a novel purpose from online friendships or communities, and DAOs are your vehicle for changing the world for the better. Maybe you just want to experience a new vibe.

This book is your no-hype resource to learn the ins and outs of the crypto ecosystem and DAOs. Think of it as your ticket to a seat on the westward train to a new, undiscovered frontier. So make yourself comfortable, and take in the sights. Please be responsible, please be careful, and—always—please remember to have fun.

We hope you enjoy your journey as much as we did.