  Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are a new type of digital
organisation that uses blockchain infrastructure (e.g. smart contracts, tokens)
to coordinate a group of people around a shared mission. Like all
organisations, DAOs must attract sources of funding and other resources, and
discover and retain a talented community and workforce. To do this, they must
signal their true quality. Yet the characteristics of the environment that DAOs
operate in (pseudonymous actors, global scale, permissionless entry and exit)
makes this difficult. We apply costly signalling theory to explore the
information asymmetry problem in DAOs and some of the strategies (behaviours
and investments) and institutional solutions (including better signalling
mechanisms) that have evolved to solve this problem.
