Types of DAOs are usually distinguished by what the organization coordinates: a protocol, a pool of investment capital, a grants budget, a community, a collection, a shared workforce, or a research agenda. The taxonomy below is the one most of the industry converged on – Alchemy's survey of DAO types and Ledger Academy's DAO guide use close variants of it – but the boundaries are soft: most mature DAOs blend two or more types, so classification goes by the primary thing members govern.
Protocol DAOs govern a piece of live on-chain infrastructure – a DEX, a lending market, a stablecoin, a name service. Token holders vote on protocol parameters, upgrades, and the treasury that accrues around the protocol. They are the largest category by treasury value and governance activity, and the origin of most of the industry's governance machinery – token-weighted voting, delegation, timelocks. Examples with deep coverage on this wiki: Uniswap DAO, Sky (formerly MakerDAO), and ENS DAO. A large sub-family are the network DAOs that govern whole Layer-2s and multichain stacks the same way – Polygon, Arbitrum, and the Optimism Collective among them.
Investment DAOs pool member capital and vote on deals – early-stage tokens, equity via legal wrappers, NFTs, or other DAOs. Because pooled investing triggers securities law, these are usually member-capped and legally wrapped (see DAO legal structures); The LAO, a Delaware-wrapped, for-profit investment DAO launched in 2020, is the canonical example, and MetaCartel Ventures runs the same play on the Moloch framework – whose rage-quit mechanism lets any member exit with their pro-rata share rather than be dragged into a deal they opposed.
Grant DAOs give money away rather than invest it – funding public goods, ecosystem development, or research that markets underfund. MolochDAO (Ethereum infrastructure grants, since 2019) is the minimalist archetype; Gitcoin industrialized the category with quadratic funding, which weights many small community donations above a few whales – including dedicated DeSci rounds. Grant programs are also how protocol DAOs recycle their treasuries, which is why the categories blur (see DAO treasury management).
Social DAOs coordinate a community rather than capital: membership is token-gated, and governance decides events, content, and shared spaces. Friends With Benefits (FWB) and Developer DAO are the usual examples – Ledger Academy's guide covers the category. Social DAOs demonstrated that a token can bootstrap belonging, but most struggled to convert cultural energy into durable treasuries.
Gaming or guild DAOs coordinate players rather than capital or collectibles. A guild pools the NFTs a blockchain game requires, lends them to members who could not otherwise afford to play, and shares the in-game yield – the "scholarship" model. Yield Guild Games (YGG) is the canonical example, born in the Philippines during the play-to-earn boom and now issuing soulbound guild-reputation badges through its Onchain Guilds protocol. The category is defined by its dependence on external game economies: the guild is only as durable as the games that pay out.
Collector DAOs acquire and steward culturally significant assets – NFTs, art, memorabilia. PleasrDAO's headline acquisitions and Nouns DAO – which auctions one NFT per day, each carrying one vote, funding a perpetual treasury (nouns.wtf) – define the genre. ConstitutionDAO was the category's viral moment: ~$47M crowdfunded in a week from ~17,000 people to bid on a first printing of the U.S. Constitution, then dissolved and refunded when the bid lost (see history of DAOs).
Service DAOs are on-chain talent collectives that sell work – RaidGuild, a web3 dev collective built on Moloch, is the archetype. Media DAOs coordinate community-owned publishing; BanklessDAO is the best documented, including its public debates on contributor compensation.
Science DAOs fund and govern research – a hybrid of grant and investment DAO in which funded intellectual property is often tokenized as IP-NFTs so the community holds upside in what it funds. VitaDAO (longevity) is the flagship; the wiki's DeSci DAOs page maps the field.
Real organizations migrate across categories: protocol DAOs run grant programs, grant DAOs manage investment-sized treasuries, social DAOs spin up service guilds. a16z's DAO canon treats the types less as species than as modules – funding, membership, and governance patterns that any DAO composes. What actually distinguishes a DAO is which decisions its members can bind on-chain, which is a question of governance model, not category.
Capers sit deliberately at the investment/venture end of this taxonomy, with the other types' tools built in rather than bolted on. Every caper is a member-funded DAO whose treasury fills from a bonding-curve token sale, and members direct that treasury through proposals, each carrying one on-chain action. Three of those actions map onto the types above: PAYOUT (pay any recipient – grant-DAO behavior), INVEST (buy another caper's tokens into the treasury – venture-DAO behavior), and DIVEST (sell a holding of another caper's token back into its curve – the venture exit). The others rewrite the caper's own token metadata or, for the $CAPER caper alone, upgrade the platform's shared logic, and a Debate option settles a question without executing anything. Exit rights are built into the protocol: any member who has cast a ranked ballot can redeem their governance and vote tokens at any time for their fair share of the treasury, and the same earned weight that decides their vote governs what they take.