DAO Votes To Decide What A DAO Is Before Making Any Other Decisions

A newly formed Decentralized Autonomous Organization has spent its first nine weeks of existence debating and voting on a single foundational proposal: defining what, exactly, a DAO is and whether they are one. The organization, CommunityForge DAO, was created in January by seventeen founding members who pooled $240,000 in cryptocurrency with the stated goal of "funding community-driven projects through decentralized governance." No projects have been funded. No governance has occurred. The $240,000 remains in the treasury, untouched, earning yield on a protocol that the DAO has not yet voted to approve. "Before we can govern, we need to agree on what governing means in a decentralized context," said founding member Priya Quorum. "And before we can agree on that, we need to agree on how we agree, which requires governance, which we haven't defined yet." Proposal #1, titled "Definition of CommunityForge DAO and Scope of Decentralized Authority," was submitted on January 14 and underwent seven amendments over nine weeks. The first amendment sought to define "decentralized." The second amendment sought to define "autonomous." The third amendment questioned whether the word "organization" implied a hierarchy that contradicted the principle of decentralization. The proposal passed on March 18 with 51.2% of the vote, a margin that immediately triggered a secondary debate about whether 51% constitutes legitimate consensus in a decentralized system or merely "tyranny of the slight majority," a phrase coined by dissenting member Harold Fork. Fork has submitted Proposal #2, which calls for a vote on whether the result of Proposal #1 should be considered binding. The vote is expected to take six to eight weeks. The treasury has earned $3,200 in yield during the deliberation period. A proposal to allocate the yield has not yet been submitted because the process for submitting proposals has not been formally ratified.