What is a DAO?
A plain-language explanation, with real examples from the directory.
A DAO — a decentralized autonomous organization — is a group that makes decisions in public, by voting, and holds money in accounts anyone can look inside. There is no boardroom and no registrar. The record of what it decided, and who decided it, is the organization.
That openness is what makes this site possible. It is also what makes the site necessary: an organization can keep a polished website online for years after the last person stopped showing up to vote.
How a decision gets made
Someone writes a proposal. Members vote on it, usually with voting power proportional to how much of the organization's token they hold or have been delegated. If enough voting power participates to clear a threshold the organization set for itself — its quorum — the vote counts.
Most of the votes this site reads happen off-chain, on a platform called Snapshot, where voting is free. The decision is then carried out by whoever controls the treasury.
What a treasury is
The money the organization controls, held in public wallets. Anyone can look at the balance. What matters is not only how much is there but what it is made of: an organization holding almost nothing but its own token has a treasury whose value falls exactly when it most needs money.
That is why treasury diversification is one of the four things scored here.
Why turnout matters
A proposal that passes with almost nobody voting has been decided by whoever did vote. When a handful of addresses control most of the voting power that gets cast, the vote is a formality.
This is not necessarily bad faith. Voting takes attention, and most token holders never do it. But it changes what a governance decision means, and it is worth knowing before you join, apply for a grant, or quote an organization as a going concern.
Why this site is skeptical
Where the data is ambiguous, the score goes down rather than up, and the page says why. An organization with no observable treasury is not given the benefit of the doubt; it is marked as having no treasury found.
The site describes what it observed. It never describes what an organization says about itself.
For example
Glossary
Every term this site uses, defined in two sentences.
Glossary