Welcome back to the breakdown.

An everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.

The breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.

Welcome back to The Breakdown.

What's going on, guys?

It is Thursday, January 9th, and today we're doing a special narrative watch edition.

So for those of you who have never heard one of my narrative watches before, it's basically

where instead of the three daily topics like usual, I hone in on one kind of theme or story or narrative that

I see as a part of the ongoing conversation. In particular, I'm always looking at things that

are changing and emerging into more significant parts of the industry. And so today's narrative

watch is about DAWS and whether 2020 is poised to be the year of the Dow.

So let's talk historically about Dows first.

So the term Dau decentralized autonomous organization originally referred to a specific organization.

And it was meant to fund projects in the crypto space and of course was famously subject to

a hack, which ultimately led to the split

between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

And there's a lot more to get into, but I think what's worth noting about that history and the

history of Dow's is that Dow's sort of escaped the worst excesses of the irrational exuberance

of the 2017 ICO boom. And what I mean by

that was that people were so cool already on the idea of DAOs because of this hack when the

ICU boom happened, that all of that energy and attention kind of passed them by. Now, of course,

there were some projects that were still passionate about that.

...