(1) (
Decentralized
Autonomous
Organization) A blockchain-based association that is run by its members, who each get one vote. Although all rules and financial records of a DAO are maintained on the blockchain, a DAO appears to have ambiguous legal status. Also called a "decentralized autonomous corporation" (DAC).
The Dash cryptocurrency is run by a DAO, and many other groups have organized as a DAO (see
ConstitutionDAO,
Endaoment and
Dash). For the DAO-based organization that was famously hacked, see
The DAO.
(2) (
Data
Access
Objects) A programming interface for data access from Microsoft. DAO/Jet provides access to the Jet database, and DAO/ODBCDirect provides an interface to ODBC databases via RDO. DAO is a COM object. See
RDO,
ADO,
OLE DB and
ODBC. See also
disc-at-once.