Vitalik Buterin Calls for Rethinking DAO Design in Crypto Industry

According to ChainCatcher, Vitalik Buterin has expressed concerns that the current practices in the crypto industry regarding Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have deviated from their original vision. He suggests a need to rethink and construct 'different and better DAO designs.' Buterin notes that Ethereum's initial concept was heavily inspired by DAOs, but they have now often been reduced to 'token-voting controlled vaults,' which, while operational in form, are inefficient, easily manipulated, and fail to address issues arising from human political games. Buterin emphasizes that DAOs remain an indispensable infrastructure with applications such as improving oracle design, enabling on-chain dispute arbitration, maintaining various critical lists, quickly launching short-term collaborative projects, and supporting long-term project maintenance after the original team exits. He believes the current issues lie not in participant motivation but in the inadequacies of governance and oracle system designs. In terms of governance frameworks, Buterin introduces the analysis perspective of 'concavity and convexity problems,' suggesting that different types of issues require different governance structures. Scenarios favoring consensus and robustness should emphasize broad participation and resistance to manipulation, while those requiring decisive action should allow for leadership, balanced by decentralized mechanisms. Buterin further points out that for DAOs to truly function, they must address the challenges of privacy and decision fatigue. This can be alleviated through privacy technologies like zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and multi-party computation, as well as AI and consensus-based communication tools to ease governance burdens. He stresses that AI should not replace human judgment but serve as a tool to amplify and assist human intentions. Finally, Buterin states that future DAO designs need to consider governance mechanisms, privacy technologies, and communication layers as core components rather than auxiliary modules, ensuring that the decentralization and robustness of Ethereum's underlying infrastructure are maintained in its upper-layer applications.