Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have gained widespread attention in academia and industry as potential future models for decentralized governance and organization. In order to understand the trends and future potential of this rapidly growing technology, it is crucial to conduct research in the field. This research aims at a data-driven approach for the objective content analysis of big data related to DAOs, using text mining and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-based topic modeling. The study analyzed tweets with the hashtag #DAO and all Reddit data with “DAO”. The results were from the identification of the top 100 frequently appearing keywords, as well as the top 20 keywords with high network centrality, and key topics related to finance, gaming, and fundraising, from both Twitter and Reddit. The analysis revealed twelve topics from Twitter and eight topics from Reddit, with the term “community” frequently appearing across many of these topics. The findings provide valuable insights into the current trend and future potential of DAOs, and should be used by researchers to guide further research in the field and by decision makers to explore innovative ways to govern the organizations.

Decentralization holds a significant role in the context of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), with its nature being not a fixed value but a comparative spectrum. Prior research investigating the measurement of decentralization in nations’ governance system provides a foundation for our current study. This research aims to integrate these insights to define dimensions and indicators, tailored explicitly for assessing decentralization levels within DAOs. Then, the article undertakes an examination of the suitability of traditional decentralization measurement approaches within the unique DAO context, employing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) as our analytical tool based on a total of 44 DAOs. Hence, the results suggest that DAOs have three dimensions for measuring decentralization, ‘political decentralization as a participatory engagement’, ‘economic decentralization as a resource distribution’, and ‘administrative decentralization as the self-governing execution of decisions’. By substantiating the applicability of established decentralization measurement frameworks within the unique context of DAOs, the findings not only enhance the understanding of this emergent governance paradigm but also provide DAO practitioners, policymakers, and researchers with invaluable insights.