@EasonC13 I’m so glad to know you like it. @jmcgirk Thanks for your questions and comments. From my own observation, some other factors that might explain:
- Aragon is the earliest one between them, which means that it could catch eyes with some blasting form. It also performs development progress at a good pace and updating of codes.
- Aragon has greater social media community attention, such as Twitter and Reddit users. For example, the followers of Aragon, DAOhaus, and DAOstack’s Twitter today (2021/11/6) are 90.4K Followers, 10.2K Followers, and 8,753 Followers, respectively.
- Aragon is more focused on providing general and easy-to-use modules that are both applicable to traditional centralized entities and decentralized communities, while others are more dedicated to providing infrastructures for decentralized forms.
- Aragon provides better UX for non-technical background users with clear and readable (from a non-technical perspective) UI.
- The promotion of their tokens, such as the number of exchanges their tokens listed, tokens’ capital, the advisors’ backgrounds, famous use cases projects, all further affect the investors’ confidence and users’ choice, and it’s just like a trust spiral. As the authors said, “Given DAOs are an early field relying on a novel technology, growth by early adopters is critical for the future mainstream adoption”. It’s probable that before something big happens, their development may follow rules like “The winner takes it all”.
There may be some potential limitations of this study:
- The authors mentioned that many DAO cases on these platforms are built for the purpose of experiments. I believe this may affect the result, especially for platforms that are easy to try.
- It seems that the paper omits Aragon Chain, which may affect a little bit in the context of the high gas fee on Ethereum.
- As the structures behind DAOs may not be unveiled thoroughly to the public, it couldn’t discuss the DAOs for decentralized communities and DAOs for centralized entities separately.
- The authors also mentioned some limitations of the collection of data, including (Faqir-Rhazoui Y., et al., 2021)
xDai-
“there is no available data about the proposals in xDai in Aragon”
Growth-
“the timestamp of the DAO creation currently is not available for DAOstack DAOs, while the timestamp of the user registration is not available for Aragon DAOs”, “our data does not reflect when a xDai DAO is new or the result of a migration process”
Activity-
“for Aragon xDai actions, we can only consider data from the Transaction app because the API does not provide data from the Voting app in xDai…may result in a highly conservative estimation in Aragon, where DAOs can be customized with different apps, and, hence, exhibit other types of activities”
Voting system-
“In the case of Aragon, DAOs may have multiple voting systems. However, for the sake of simplicity, we just retrieved data from the standard voting app”
Funds-
“DeepDAO does not provide information from all the DAOs in the considered ecosystems” - The definition of ‘active’ may also play a significant role.