Every failed decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) tells roughly the same story: a burst of idealism, a Discord server with too many channels, and a treasury someone eventually walked off with. Magenta Ceiba has spent years building the exceptions. As a project manager at dOrg, one of the few DAOs that has quietly kept working since 2019 and the first ever legally recognized as an LLC in the US, and co-founder of Bloom Network, a regenerative social cooperative building peer-to-peer economic infrastructure for local communities, she has a theory about why most fail. And it has nothing to do with the blockchain. Every failed decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) tells roughly the same story: a burst of idealism, a Discord server with too many channels, and a treasury someone eventually walked off with. Magenta Ceiba has spent years building the exceptions. As a project manager at dOrg, one of the few DAOs that has quietly kept working since 2019 and the first ever legally recognized as an LLC in the US, and co-founder of Bloom Network, a regenerative social cooperative building peer-to-peer economic infrastructure for local communities, she has a theory about why most fail. And it has nothing to do with the blockchain. Magenta Ceiba Magenta Ceiba dOrg dOrg Bloom Network Bloom Network Most people find their way into DAOs through crypto. You came through a completely different door. What brought you here? My background is in grassroots movement building, specifically building a global mobilization network around climate adaptation. The problem I kept running into is that both philanthropy and venture capital are structurally incompatible with community-led development. I think of it as business ecosystem development: businesses that orient around a place, whose models are interconnected, whose success depends on local conditions and relationships. That just doesn't fit centralized finances. Funders want legible outcomes, short timelines, individual accountability. Community organizing doesn't work like that. And so when I found the blockchain community and DAOs, those were the people thinking seriously about why decentralized governance and decentralized control of finances matter. Not as a technical curiosity, but as a structural necessity for certain kinds of organizing to even be possible. For someone who's only heard of DAOs as a punchline, what is dOrg? I usually describe dOrg as a digital cooperative. More precisely, it's a service DAO: a collective of developers, designers, operations people, and marketers who do client work together, building applications, forming organizations, handling technical strategy. The idea is that instead of a traditional agency with executives at the top calling the shots, everyone in the collective has a say in what gets worked on, who gets paid what, and how decisions get made. If you need to build something cutting-edge that doesn't exist yet, we're the people you call. The clients we've worked with have collectively reached over $4 billion in total value locked, including StarkWare and Usual Protocol. dOrg teams have also built tools used across the wider ecosystem, including Zodiac, which lets organizations use their treasury infrastructure inside other apps. We've been at it since 2019, which in DAO years is ancient. Most don't make it that far. Why do most DAOs fail? Two reasons, mostly! First one is going flat by default. There's a widespread assumption that because you're in a DAO, hierarchy of any kind is illegitimate. Jo Freeman wrote about this in the 1970s. She called it the tyranny of structurelessness. When you refuse to acknowledge formal structure, you don't eliminate hierarchy. You just make it informal and unaccountable… power still concentrates, it’s just that nobody can name it or challenge it. That's the default mode for most DAOs: the appearance of equality, with all the dysfunction of hidden hierarchy underneath. any kind What you actually want is to honor authentic leadership and real expertise. Who has decision-making authority over which budgets? Who gets consulted when the DAO is setting direction? Who is accountable if something breaks? If those things aren't defined, you get people weighing in on decisions they have no background in, and nobody owns the results. And you'd be surprised how often that happens. Structure isn't the enemy of decentralization. Unacknowledged structure is. The second problem, and this one really gets me, is that DAOs are way too technology-oriented. So many of them keep funding more tooling, more infrastructure, more vocabulary, while the communities they're supposedly serving don't need any of it. They don't need to know the words. They don't need to be part of anyone's blockchain meme culture. What they need is financial and governance infrastructure that just works in the background. The tech is already there: we have account abstraction, which means people can use blockchain apps without ever touching a crypto wallet or worrying about gas fees. The interfaces are getting good enough that you can barely tell the difference from a regular app. So why are we still leading with the technical complexity? It's what keeps DAOs marginal, and it's kind of the opposite of what most of them say they're trying to do. What has kept dOrg running when most don't? Being a service DAO gives us something a lot of DAOs don't have: a clear purpose. That coherence shapes how we work, who we bring in, and what we say no to. A lot of DAOs try to be a general-purpose vehicle for decentralization and end up as nothing in particular. You could have a nanny DAO, a marketing DAO, a research DAO. But it has to be something specific. Then there's our high bar for membership. We built a reputation for taking on complex work that didn't exist yet, which means you need people who can actually do it. And once that's set, it shapes the culture in ways that are hard to manufacture later. But the thing most people underestimate is operations. We have someone, Clara Gromaches, whose job is to keep the communication structures coherent. Our Discord has a small number of active channels. Our governance forum, where members propose and vote on decisions, has five categories and stays that way. If one channel goes out of use, she archives it. If something's out of alignment, she surfaces it and fixes it. It sounds boring, I know. But I genuinely think it's one of the main reasons we're still here. Being small is also a feature, not a liability. Federated smaller DAOs might actually be a better model for growth than trying to make one DAO do everything. What does blockchain add that a shared bank account and a group chat can't? What if the core Occupy group had a PayPal account managed by one person, and they walked out with the funds? That's a real risk in movement organizing. You can structurally prevent that with a well-configured multisignature wallet, where several members have to approve any transaction before it goes through. It sounds niche until you realize how common it is, in activist movements and in companies, for someone to just decide the money is theirs now. But honestly, the more interesting answer is what developer Andy Tudhope describes as blockchain enabling money as programmable language. With DAO tooling, you can define what currency you're using, what properties it has, who holds decision-making power, and under what conditions. Those rules are transparent and enforced by code. Power dynamics don't dissolve just because you're using smart contracts. But the bar for manipulation is higher, and the audit trail is there. Traditional organizing tools just don't offer that. Where do you see DAOs having the most real-world impact? Service DAOs are the clearest case and also the most underexplored. Think about how most agencies work: the execs take outsized salaries, the people below have no say in what they work on, and you just get handed whatever client comes through the door. In a service DAO, members decide peer-to-peer what clients to take on, pay themselves better because the management overhead is gone, and everyone can see the financial flows. dOrg is basically that model in practice. that model in practice that model in practice Science DAOs are another one. A lot of researchers don't want to work for big pharma or defense, but they have almost no say in what gets funded. If you had a science DAO, you could fund disease treatments without the incentive to make gobs of money off you forever, prioritize ecology-aligned research, work on problems that matter rather than problems that pay. The people are already there, but the governance structure isn't. And then there's community organizing, which is where I started, and what Bloom Network is built around. The current philanthropic model is pretty centralized: funders who aren't on the ground deciding what gets funded, often without the context to make good decisions. If you replaced that with local communities organized as interconnected DAOs, making their own decisions about food security, housing, and environmental health, you'd move faster, make fewer mistakes, and the people who understand the problem would actually be in the room. AI agents are starting to appear in DAO governance. Does that make DAOs more or less human? I’d hope more human, but I’m not convinced that’s where it’s heading. There are some good use cases… helping figure out not just who is voting on a decision, but who should be consulted and why. Helping someone get up to speed on a long governance thread before casting a vote. Those are places where augmented intelligence makes the process wiser rather than just faster. What concerns me is how many people are deploying agents without really understanding the security implications. If your DAO is handling high-stakes business logic or sensitive organizing, that's a real risk nobody's really talking about. Where it gets interesting to me is using AI for simulations before you commit to real governance decisions. There was an experiment where researchers created AI politicians, each programmed with distinct traits and beliefs, and had them allocate capital in a quadratic funding round, where voting power is distributed so no single group can dominate. That I'd love to see more of, as long as we keep the human judgment in the loop. Is decentralized governance utopia? It's an aspirational utopia, with a lot of peril and booby traps along the way. I do wish the DAO space borrowed more from on-the-ground organizing movements. There are communities that have been doing decentralized coordination for decades, without any of the technical vocabulary, and they've figured out a lot of what works. Most DAOs don't tap into that at all. There's a tendency to assume the technology is the new thing and everything else is old, when really it's just a new layer on very old questions: who holds power, who is accountable, and who gets to decide. The sweet spot, if there is one, is where local communities, technologists, and people who care about getting this right are actually working together rather than talking past each other. The DAO community has a long way to go there. As AI continues to disrupt jobs, it just opens up more possibilities for different kinds of structures for human coordination. The pressure to figure this out is only going to grow. So the gap will close. It has to.

Between Two Computer Monitors: This story includes an interview between the writer and guest/interviewee. 

The Tyranny of Structurelessness Is Killing DAOs, Says dOrg's Magenta Ceiba

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