Vitalik Buterin: We need more and better DAOs, not just vaults controlled by token voting.

In an article, Vitalik Buterin stated that the current practice of DAOs in the crypto industry has deviated from the original vision, necessitating a rethinking and construction of "different and better DAO designs." Vitalik pointed out that Ethereum's initial concept was heavily inspired by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), but today DAOs are often simplified into "treasuries controlled by token voting," which, while functional in form, are inefficient, easily manipulated, and fail to truly alleviate the problems arising from human political games. Vitalik emphasized that DAOs remain indispensable infrastructure, with applications including: improving oracle design, implementing on-chain dispute arbitration, maintaining various key lists, quickly launching short-term collaborative projects, and supporting long-term project maintenance after the original team leaves. He believes the current problem lies not in participant motivation, but in the inadequacies of the system design itself, including governance and oracles. Regarding governance frameworks, Vitalik introduced the analytical perspective of the "concave vs. convex problem," arguing that different types of problems require different governance structures: scenarios leaning towards consensus and robustness should emphasize broad participation and resistance to manipulation; while scenarios requiring decisive decision-making should allow for leadership, while being checked and balanced through decentralized mechanisms. Vitalik further pointed out that for DAOs to truly function, they must address the two major challenges of privacy and decision fatigue, and can alleviate the governance burden by leveraging privacy technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and multi-party computation, as well as AI and consensus-based communication tools. He emphasized that AI should not replace human judgment, but rather serve as a tool to amplify and assist human intentions. Finally, Vitalik stated that future DAO designs need to consider governance mechanisms, privacy technologies, and communication layers as core components, not subordinate modules, to ensure that the decentralized and robust performance of the Ethereum underlying layer is continued in its upper-layer applications.