The number of active DAOs is up 660% since 2019

The growth of active decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) is accelerating, increasing from 10 last year to around 76 today, according to DeepDao founder and CEO Eyal Eithcowich.

DeepDAO provides insights and analysis into decentralized autonomous organizations, with the platform recently launching a new interface allowing users to better probe the health and wealth of DAOs.

The platform’s data shows that a large assets under management (AUM) figure does not necessarily indicate the health and good governance of a DAO.

For example, mStable is the top-ranking project by assets under management and capital flows, however, it ranks poorly by membership and proposals — with just nine members having voted on 29 proposals in total.

By contrast, dxDAO ranks second by proposals with 268, and third for membership, with 428, despite having less than 10% of mStable’s AUM.

The recent decentralized finance (DeFi) boo has given renewed importance to DAOs as a critical component of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, with many projects seeking to distribute governance voting rights among their users.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Eithcowich described the platform’s mission as bringing “all the DAOs together [to] provide very clear and approachable data” to inform a “discoverability engine.”

Eithcowich said that his interest in decentralized organization stems from his activist past, noting that he was “part of a movement that had decentralized ambitions” in 2008 in his home country of Israel.

However, after the organization rose to prominence as the largest party in Tel Aviv’s city council elections, Eithcowich said that power had consolidated around a small group of individuals, resulting in the exodus of many activists and the death of the movement by 2014.

We had the best intentions, but we still collapsed into a very narrow structure.

Eithcowich predicts that DAO’s will disrupt the governing structures for a myriad of organizations in the wider community, including the structure of political parties, insurance firms, venture capital funds, sporting teams, and publishers.

The revamped website provides key overviews of the DAO sector, including weekly and monthly fluctuations in assets under management (AUM), a tally of the total membership of DAOs combined, and a running score of the DAOs that represent more than $1 million in AUM or more than 100 members.

Individual DAOs are ranked according to a variety of metrics — including their fiat value, membership, the number of proposals put forth by an organization, and rates of voter participation in governance processes.