Glossary
DAO
A decentralised autonomous organisation: rules and treasury controlled by token-holder votes, not a company board.
A DAO is an organisation whose rules, treasury and decisions live in contracts and votes rather than in a management team's discretion. Holding the governance token is the mechanism of control.
The appeal is that rules are public and a treasury cannot simply disappear. The recurring problem is that voting participation is low, so a small group of holders makes decisions for everyone, often without much transparency about their own position.
A DAO is a governance structure, not a magic word. Check who holds the votes, what the treasury actually holds, and whether there is any mechanism to fix a bad decision once it has been made.