(1) (
Decentralized
Autonomous
Organization) A community association that is run by its members. A DAO's blockchain-based governance tokens are used to vote on all projects and procedures of the organization, which are ratified by the DAO's smart contracts. Although all rules and financial records of a DAO are maintained on the blockchain, a DAO appears to have ambiguous legal status. Also called a "decentralized autonomous corporation" (DAC).
The Dash cryptocurrency is run by a DAO, and many other groups have organized as a DAO (see
ConstitutionDAO,
Endaoment,
Dash and
Gitcoin). For the earlier DAO-based organization that was famously hacked, see
The DAO.
(2) (
Data
Access
Objects) A programming interface for data access from Microsoft. DAO/Jet provides access to the Jet database, and DAO/ODBCDirect provides an interface to ODBC databases via RDO. DAO is a COM object. See
RDO,
ADO,
OLE DB and
ODBC. See also
disc-at-once.