Arbitrum Governance Fracas Reopens the Question: Why DAOs?

Arbitrum’s DAO was pitched as a way to “decentralize” control of the protocol’s development away from Offchain Labs, the company that launched Arbitrum, and bring users and “the community” into the fold. Tokens were airdropped, a reward to early adopters of the system, seemingly with great promise. Unfortunately, the project took some 18 months to build goodwill and a consistent user base, then damaged its credibility in five minutes, according to critics on the project’s Discord.