Introduction

Blockchain is a paradigm shifting technology and its ensuing impact to human society is long believed by many participants to eventually match that of the Internet and beyond – yet unlike the Internet, blockchain adoption in the real world is stuck with a rather narrow application, namely cryptocurrency, which is an alternative financial scheme that has had a hard time getting accepted by the mainstream financial institutions. Recently there are some cracks in this bleak picture, i.e., the government of El Salvador legalizing Bitcoin as national currency. Nonetheless major sovereign states around the world still take a very negative view of its utility, treating it as a threat to the stability of the established financial regime. The Internet almost never had this “mainstream acceptance” problem, because it is naturally part of the existing social order – a centralized social regime that brought us the mega-tech companies that shape how we think and behave in the digital world – a world with mass surveillance and privacy erosion.

The mission of the blockchain revolution is not to match the Internet – it is to surpass, subvert, and fundamentally change the Internet of today. In order to do so we must build to lift blockchain beyond the cryptocurrency legacy. The global blockchain community enthusiastically embraces this vision – they call it – Web3.

Web3 aims to mend the shortcomings of the existing Internet by extending the world wide web utilizing certain blockchain technology (such as Ethereum), giving the web a decentralized flavor. However, this is not enough. The web, as centralized as it ever be today, cannot be simply mended by some API¹. We need to inject massive new human behaviors into our connected digital world. What we need, is not one mechanism, but many mechanisms (the more the better); not just economics, but also economy.

This new economy to lift Web3 beyond the Internet, is called DAC Economy.

DAC stands for Decentralized Autonomous Company, a specialization of the concept of DAO². Whereas most DAOs in the blockchain world deal with governance, the Metis DAO³, an Ethereum Layer2 infrastructure solution, went beyond the usual Governance DAO paradigm to provide functionality enabling Management DAO, a construct that expands traditional DAO with decentralized day-to-day operations, prompting what we call the DAC Economy.

Our delineation of DAC Economy shall be split into 3 parts:

Part 1 is about the prehistory of blockchain economy that necessitates the emergence of a solution such as Metis DAO.

(cont.)