Looking back, 2020 was definitely the year of DEFIs, and 2021 the boom of NFTs, and while I think both markets will continue to rise this year (not only in terms of money, but in tools, users and activity), I noticed since the end of last year a big movement in terms of developers, funders and visionaries towards DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).

A DAO is a community organized on a Blockchain, created for a specific purpose and whose owners are inevitably the members of the community, without a central leadership. DAOs are what could be called "the organization behind Web3", and they are transparent, universal and programmed. Universal because anyone who meets the established requirements can be part of them, transparent because their information is public, and programmed because its created by a smart contracts (although a DAO can be born before it's smart contract, the functionalities that turn it into a DAO require that they are already programmed). Something important to bear in mind is that DAOs can have a Treasury, which consists of all the money deposited by their founders, members, and what they have been able to generate over time. The use of this treasury will be decided by the will of the members.

How does a DAO operate? For one thing, users use popular platforms to communicate with each other, like Discord, Telegram and their own forums, limiting some social networks such as Twitter or Reddit to reach the public that is not truly engaged (being part of a DAO could be very time demanding).

Key tools in use today:

I**) Multisig**. It is a wallet that requires several private signatures to be used in order to sign a transaction. This is done so that the DAO treasury is not exclusively in the hands of one person, and one of the keys may even be subject to a general vote of the members. This practice is becoming more and more common, thus allowing users to have a say in the DAO's money, helping to ensure that it has a use that the user considers ideal.

II) Tokens. Another practice that is becoming common is to issue a governance protocol token in order to compensate the DAO members and contributors with a token that allows them to have voting power. The same token is usually traded on exchanges, so it will also have a pecuniary value. At the same time, the use of NFTs as a voting method is also starting to be implemented, where instead of having fungible tokens(mostly ERC20), NFTs (ERC721) represent participation in a DAO, giving voting rights.

III) Voting mechanism. It is important that the mechanism is public and transparent, ideally a snapshot is made at a certain time prior to voting (i.e., a "snapshot" is taken of the amount of tokens that all wallets have and that will be their voting power, regardless of whether a wallet later bought or sold said tokens).