# kaal:claim:3441904-015

**Claim.** Curators were the core point of centralization in the original 2016 DAO because the smart contract could not on its own distinguish real from fake proposals, leaving curators with approval and vote prioritization power before any community vote.

**Type.** mechanism  **Support.** evidenced

**Holds when.**

- the original 2016 DAO curator whitelist design

**Source quote.**

> Because the smart contract on its own could not distinguish real from fake proposals, the curators had approval power and vote prioritization power over contractor proposals before the proposals were put up to a DAO community vote.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance* (2019), III.1 Centralized Design Elements in the Original 2016 DAO, page 14

**Cite as.** Wulf A. Kaal, Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance (2019). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3441904

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `e6b562527f7f19accaa35491db0a0db168b6a936755e1dca424e9f30bee7a815` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Kaal%20-%202019%20-%20Blockchain-Based%20Corporate%20Governance.pdf

**Failure mode.** curator-bottleneck  (family: recentralization-drift)

**Topics.** decentralization, dao, governance-design

**Keywords.** centralization, curators, dao, voting-design

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.