Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO)

An organisation whose governance rules and treasury management are encoded in smart contracts and executed according to member voting, operating without a traditional centralised management structure.

Applied: MakerDAO governs the DAI stablecoin protocol entirely through token-holder votes; the original ‘The DAO’ on Ethereum in 2016 also became a cautionary case after a smart contract exploit led to a contentious hard fork.