What is Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)?

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a blockchain-based organization that is democratically managed by members through open-source code and typically formalized by self-enforcing smart contracts. DAOs lack centralized management structures. All decisions are voted upon by network stakeholders. DAOs often utilize a native utility token to incentivize network participation, and allocate proportional voting power to stakeholders based on the size of their stake. As DAOs are built on top blockchains — often Ethereum — their transactions are executed transparently on the underlying blockchain.