DAOs: Life Rafts for Emerging Market Entrepreneurs

Emerging market entrepreneurs no longer have to dismay at their countries’ weak rule of law. Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) can offer them another option. DAOs enable entrepreneurs to borrow jurisdictions outside their own country, gaining offshore legal protection. This could have game-changing implications for tens of thousands of startups in emerging markets, helping them launch the next big thing from anywhere in the world.

Until now, emerging market (EM) business founders were at the mercy of the legal system, gummed-up courts, and bribe-seeking institutional gatekeepers of whichever geographic territory they found themselves. Contract enforcement could take up to ten years or police could demand thousands of dollars to enforce the law.

Founders also suffered from capital controls, inflation, deficient public markets, or rickety financial plumbing of their geographic territory. Capital controls meant entrepreneurs struggled to get any capital infusions or to move their hard-earned profits into more stable currencies — especially relevant in this 2022 age of currency crashes in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, to name a few.

Enter the DAO.

DAOs allow entrepreneurs to create an entity at a very low cost. They no longer have to grease bureaucrats’ hands with…