{"title": "DAO Death", "website": "https://daodeath.com", "createdAt": 1700669765027, "credentials": {}, "description": "DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are often defined primarily in terms of their structure (that is, their lack of centralized leadership). However, equally interesting is the property of autonomous operation. Smart contracts on an immutable substrate allow these digitally-constituted organizations to persist and operate completely independently, drawing comparisons to rudimentary artificial intelligence systems or even more complex structures like entire organisms. The analogy is apt, especially if one considers a more instinct-driven unit (e.g., an ant or a bee). Insofar as DAOs are, in fact, organism-like, we can say that they faithfully follow the instructions encoded into the DNA of their smart contracts. But they also fail to perform one of the most basic functions of substantially all other autonomous beings: death. When most other organisms outlive their usefulness or otherwise get outcompeted (or actively hunted by humans in an effort to shape an ecosystem), they die—either entirely and go extinct, or sometimes just enough that they are forced to evolve. We don’t have a mechanism to forcefully wind up DAOs, but perhaps we should. This paper proposes research on a potential construction for “DAO Death,” either voluntarily or when a DAO gets outcompeted in the ecosystem. [Important Note: credit for this idea goes largely to a number of people who engaged in this conversation at the recent Global Governance Gathering, including but not limited to Ven, Jake H., Eve, Marcus Aurelius, Josh, and others. I hope this proposal spurs additional conversation, but I want to make sure the initial credit goes to the right place and would encourage the aforementioned contributors to participate in constructing this]."}