Blockchain, DAOs and the decentralization of business activities

Abstract

Information technology has substantially affected the existing industry and created new ones, enabling the development of businesses we would have never thought of before. The Internet has radically changed the way we do business and the way we interact with each other.

At the moment a new technology is being developed that will supposedly have a similar disruptive effect over the current way we do and manage businesses. The innovation at issue is the Blockchain technology. This new system should create a cheaper, easier, and more efficient way of doing business with the advantage of being more secure than previous solutions.

Blockchain is a public, trusted and shared ledger (The Economist). Shared since it is based on peer-to-peer network, meaning that it is not controlled or managed by a single individual, but by all its participants. It is available to all participants, hence public; and data cannot be manipulated without being noticed, which makes it a trusted ledger. This specific set of attributes, make the Blockchain technology not only more secure when managing sensible data, but also able to eliminate intermediaries when transferring information.

Blockchain technology is usually associated with the virtual cryptocurrency “Bitcoin”, but the potential of it is not necessarily associated with them. Blockchain can be adapted to fit many industries and business models, but most importantly, it can be used to create organizations able to support themselves autonomously from a financial and organizational point of view. Decentralization, autonomy and Blockchain meet in what are defined as DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that together with “Smart Contracts”, one of the most far-reaching application of the technology so far, are supposed to be able to replace several functions in the managerial sector.

It is still unclear what the possible applications of this technology will be and what kind of consequences it will have on the business and non-business world. For now, the aim is to analyze the state of the art of the applications of this technology and study the direction this technology is moving toward.

This thesis will study how the innovation will eventually be able to challenge previous assumptions on managerial models and how it will be able to create new ones.