  Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) use smart contracts to foster
communities working toward common goals. Existing definitions of
decentralization, however-the 'D' in DAO-fall short of capturing key properties
characteristic of diverse and equitable participation. We propose a new metric
called Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE, pronounced ''vibe'') that formalizes a broad
notion of decentralization in voting on DAO proposals. VBE measures the
similarity of participants' utility functions across a set of proposals. We use
VBE to prove a number of results about the decentralizing effects of vote
delegation, proposal bundling, bribery, and quadratic voting. Our results lead
to practical suggestions for enhancing DAO decentralization. One of our results
highlights the risk of systemic bribery with increasing DAO decentralization.
To show that this threat is realistic, we present the first practical
realization of a Dark DAO, a proposed mechanism for privacy-preserving
corruption of identity systems, including those used in DAO voting. Our
Dark-DAO prototype uses trusted execution environments (TEEs) in the Oasis
Sapphire blockchain for attacks on Ethereum DAOs. It demonstrates that Dark
DAOs constitute a realistic future concern for DAO governance.
