Number of DAOs increases 8x along with spike in votes and proposals

The total number of DAOs has increased dramatically over the past 12 months along with their participation rates, but it may not mean decentralized governance is catching on.

The total number of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), the number of governance proposals put forward and the number of votes cast have all seen astounding 8-times growth over the past 12 months.

Data compiled by Snapshot Labs and shared by Electric Capital Engineer Emre Caliskan in a Thursday tweet highlighted that DAO numbers have increased by 8.8 times, from 700 in May 2021 to 6,000 now. The number of proposals has increased by 8.5 times, and the number of total votes has increased by 8.3 times over the past 12 months, from 448,000 to 3.7 million.

1/ DAO governance activity is exploding . In the last year, we have seen:

• 8.8x in # of DAOs
• 8.5x in # of proposals
• 8.3x in # of votes

Here are 10+ key insights from @SnapshotLabs data on DAO governance pic.twitter.com/45KAOeER5y

— Emre ⚡ (@n4motto) June 8, 2022

Snapshot is a decentralized governance participation portal where DAO members can propose new initiatives and vote on them. The data was compiled in collaboration with Electric Capital, a Web3 investment firm.

While the findings look promising for decentralized governance models, the increase in participation was driven by just a small handful of the most active DAOs. New proposals mostly came from just 10% of DAOs, while 60% of DAOs have had three or fewer proposals since their inception.

Nevertheless, the overall growth is an impressive show of confidence in the DAO structure.

Rival DAO tracking tool DeepDAO has slightly different figures and shows there are only 4,833 DAOS as of Friday.

Related: ApeCoin DAO officially favors remaining within Ethereum ecosystem

Caliskan attributed the increase in new proposals to the popularity and wide coverage of ConstitutionDAO. It was an organization set up last November with the intent of buying an original copy of the United States Constitution. The DAO was outbid at the last moment, but it proved the power such organizations can have.

According to DeepDAO, PancakeSwap and Decentraland are the two top DAOs by proposal count, with 3,300 and 1,200, respectively. Only the top 72 organizations have at least 100 proposals at the time of writing.

Despite the overall promising numbers in DAO growth, a Tuesday draft bill from the U.S. Senate could curtail their growth if no changes are made to it. It initially calls for all crypto projects to register with the government and reveal the identities of their users and founders.