The popularity of the DAO business concept is growing every day. Communities with members from different industries have emerged around innovative projects, with investors joining their capitals to achieve common goals. Thanks to decentralized autonomous organizations, all this has become possible in the digital space.
According to DeepDAO, the total market cap of all DAO tokens was around $10.1 billion as of March 22, 2022. The overall number of organizations in the ecosystem is 4,832, with 216 having more than $1 million AUM. In the last month alone, the number of governance token holders has increased by almost 6% to about 1.8 million people, and the number of active users has grown by 10% to 573,000 in the last month.
Thus, the popularity of DAOs is on the rise. Let’s look at what types of decentralized autonomous organizations exist and what specific projects are the most well-known.
Types of DAOs
The Most Famous and Largest DAOs
Uniswap is a decentralized exchange that generates automated markets for liquid asset pairs. The technology offers fast transactions and liquidity allocation at a certain price margin. Uniswap enables users to profit by funding liquidity pools.
The community has 312,800 UNI and UNI-V1 governance token holders, of which 2,800 are actively participating in the DAO. A total of 70 proposals have been made in the community, 32.9% of which have been successful.
BitDAO, based on ByBit DEX, aims to popularize open finance and the decentralized tokenized economy. The community provides development support as well as startup liquidity and funding to a wide list of projects in DeFi, DAO, NFT and online gaming.
BitDAO’s asset balance is about $2 billion and the number of BIT governance token holders is about 17,000. At the same time, the activity within the community is quite low, with only 27 active DAO users.
CGU is one of the largest guilds in Axie Infinity and other Play-to-Earn games. The organization helps aspiring players with “scholarships” to make it easier to start their gaming journey. The DAO allows for the joint purchase of in-game items and NFT artifacts and builds the organization’s overall treasury. Right now, Crypto Gaming United already has a balance sheet of more than $32 million.
The organization was created on the XDAO platform.
Mango DAO operates the Mango Markets protocol, a leveraged lending and trading platform built on the Solana blockchain using the decentralized Serum exchange.
Mango DAO has a balance of about $660 million and 175 DAO offerings. The entire community has 953 MNGO governance token holders, of which 40% actively participate in the community’s activity.
The UXD Protocol is a UXD’s algorithmic protocol on the Solana network. It was created using perpetual futures and is intended to serve decentralization, capital efficiency and stability.
The native governance token is UXP. The UXD Protocol has an asset balance of $565 million. There are only 162 governance token holders in the community, and 58% of them actively vote.
Lido is an ETH 2.0 retail staking solution. Lido DAO was designed to address project liquidity issues and is supported by several leading staking vendors. Lido has an asset balance of over $564 million.
The LDO governance token counts 13,200 holders, of which 466 are actively involved in managing the community. A total of 63 proposals were made, and the community approved more than 50% of them.
Compound is an innovative DeFi lending protocol based on stakeholder-regulated liquidity pools. Compound offers a way to generate interest income by depositing cryptocurrency. This DAO has a total treasury fund of $292.5 million.
The community counts 190,000 COMP governance token holders, with 1,100 of them being active. There were 112 proposals put to the vote, and a majority vote successfully passed 68.8% of those proposals.
Radicle is a community-driven peer-to-peer stack for collaborative software creation and a DAO for software development cooperation.
It has an asset balance of $250.5 million and over 6 million active RAD governance token holders.
Aave is a decentralized financial protocol for borrowing and lending in cryptocurrencies. The DAO serves a variety of DeFi and cross-chain products. There is a community grants program in operation.
More than 124,000 users hold the AAVE governance token. The DAO has a total asset balance of over $230 million.
DXdao is a decentralized team of website developers that was initialized by Gnosis.io. The organization develops DeFi protocols focused on prediction markets and their financial and management use.
DXdao has total assets of $76.3 million and a total of 527 DXD governance token holders. There were 787 proposals submitted to the DAO general vote, and 85.4% were successfully accepted.
The decentralized marketing platform allows businesses to meet opinion leaders. The organization is designed as a private club, membership granted by INFAM (non-fungible tokens). There were 51 NFTs issued, each giving its owner access to a private Discord Chat and Infam Launchpad, participation in bonus programs and airdrop from platform partners and other privileges.
The organization is built on the XDAO platform.
With XDAO, anyone can easily create a decentralized autonomous organization, deposit crypto assets, manage them by voting, sell the DAO’s shares and interact directly with DeFi protocols.
XDAO is a fully customizable tool that can solve all the DAO problems
For example, if 10 LPs were issued and the project's AUM is $1,000, then the value of 1 LP is $100.