A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a system that operates fully and autonomously over a blockchain protocol according to rules encoded with smart contracts. Requiring no human intervention or centralized coordination, DAOs are often referred to as trust-free systems.
With cryptographic instructions that are automatically executed when predefined conditions are triggered, DAOs provide levels of transparency, cost savings and decentralized decision-making that were previously unattainable.
The genesis of a DAO is to align the incentives of stakeholders, from founders to shareholders (with management tokens), users and the community at large.